Quoting: kshadeIt's good that you need some "premium" AI accelerator for this to work, but I also wouldn't be surprised if they decided that it has been "so successful" (read: not enough people buy the hardware) that the less fortunate will get access too - using the power of the cloud, of course.

The initial announcement does attempt to market AI surveillance as premium and desirable by restricting it to a new line of devices. MS has a 49% stake in OpenAI (effectively more than that; they are entitled to 75% of future profits until they recoup the 10 billion or so they invested), they have to hype this tripe. Selling surveillance to employers is one way to make money off this; but I'm guessing they'll also try to racket regulated sectors or corps that don't want discovery to bring them legal trouble into paying more to have a guarantee that such material isn't stored.

There's good conversation on Mastodon; for example someone making the point that baking surveillance into the OS enables domestic abuse [External Link]. (There's this whole sidebar conversation about Linux; they are correct that a victim of domestic abuse is not at the point where just switching to Linux is a solution, but anyone else who has a broader horizon definitely helps by supporting Linux as a platform that empowers users over monopolies.)

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Quoting: jarhead_hThere IS an easy answer for this. REQUIRE that ALL SOFTWARE be open sourced ten years from date of first sale. Then the community can take it from there.

My proposal in the same spirit: once a game or a significant feature of a game (an online mode for example) becomes unsupported or no longer available, a dump of the server backend must be published, anyone who owns the game (or, excuse me, has or had a license) gets access to a DRM-free version and is permitted to strip their copies of DRM or point them to other servers, and the game and its servers and supporting infrastructure are fair game for reverse engineering, emulation, and so on (reversing the kind of preservation-hostile restrictions that crop up in EULAs).

No requirement for publishers to support their old games if they don't want to, but a right for anyone willing to do it in their place.

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I've been following the progress on Mastodon [External Link], and this looks like it will be a well-polished game!

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Anyway, she's a fun character to play, very dynamic, but not an easy one (like the other "don't stop moving to the beat" characters)

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Quoting: tonitch

Quoting: elmapulthe Queen of copyleft now is a guest character in an game that support linux natively, that is just perfect!

I really think this title is cool and I wanted to see if it was real or what. I searched on google only to realise that title is not given to anyone yet ! So is it a fact now ?
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22queen+of+copyleft%22 [External Link]

I looked, the official site has Creative Commons BY-NC character designs [External Link]. It wouldn't cover this (commercial) DLC; and copyleft would be BY-SA. I don't know how the music is licensed (when going through Vocaloid software or without) either, and I think there's a lively doujin scene that would mostly ignore copyright as long as the players don't look too big. It is a form of remix culture, but not the same as open source or copyleft.

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Quoting: M@GOidSo what is he upset about: that they milked the game by creating multiple DLCs, or that they decided to end development of the game?

For anyone who didn't read the links to figure out the EE/MT relationship:

This former Deadcells dev blew the whistle on the former developer, now IP owner, of dead cells (MT), "firing" the entire outsourced dev team of 60 or so people (EE), a lot of whom were ex-MT, by making a unilateral announcement that dead cells was done being updated.

At this point MT has not been involved in dead cells outside of being an IP owner. I'm guessing most copies sold were after the split. The people who should have been involved weren't.

And it stings to think of the small cooperative behaving unfairly and the newer, traditional company offshoot supporting many more workers and being fairer to them.

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Here's some industry journalism that sheds light on the relationship between Evil Empire and Motion Twin (via the dead cells subreddit): https://www.gamesindustry.biz/from-dead-cells-to-reinventing-retro-ip-the-untold-story-of-evil-empire [External Link]

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Quoting: kneekooFormer lead designer and developer on Dead Cells, Sébastien Benard, said on Discord:
<snipped/>

Now an interesting blog post: https://deepnight.net/blog/regarding-dead-cells-termination/ [External Link]

I don't think he claims special knowledge of current events, but he would be well placed to know the history:

Quoting: DeepnightFor the context, I’ve been an associate at MT for about 19 years and was responsible for most of the design of Dead Cells, and its development, from gameplay, controls, balancing, items and down to the engine (see gamebase). I was not alone, but frankly, I had direct implications on all its parts.

Here is also a quick presentation of the Dead Cells related companies:

Motion Twin (including myself) created the game and released 2 DLCs.
While Motion Twin retained the IP, Evil Empire, created by former MT associates, continued the hard work and released 22 new major updates and DLCs, for about 5 years. They hired 50 people during that period of time.

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It's freshly released, and I've been using it for a while in beta, but I'm starting to notice that it's not getting timely security updates: curl and libcue2 are both in main, have been the subject of highly [External Link] visible vulnerabilities [External Link], they are not patched (curl (8.2.1-1ubuntu3) mantic; urgency=medium Mon, 11 Sep 2023 09:05:17 -0400; libcue (2.2.1-4) unstable; urgency=medium Wed, 20 Apr 2022 20:29:32 +0800).

The second one is one-click pwnage of a default install, so I'm getting motivated to switch (to Arch or Fedora?)

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Quoting: BotonoskiSeems like so many tech companies lately are making hair brained greedy decisions, I'm used to them doing that but not so soon ome after another... Is this an effort on the part of the rich sorts to consolidate their wealth before the recession hits hard? If so they need to cut it out, just making things worse like the TP panic buyers. Wait... it was only really worse for those who didn't panic buy.

Here's r/gachagaming (yes…) discussing this trend [External Link]. Interest rates rising after COVID are mentioned down the thread as a cause of such pressure. I don't know if it affects publicly traded companies the same way as pre-IPO startups. Unity could have done well for itself building a popular engine, but it wanted to corner the market, spent money in unreasonable ways (billions on acquiring movie effect companies, a hundred million a year on its top executives…). Now it's suddenly finding debts are expensive and trying to squeeze everybody else.

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