@Cthulhu_, thank you for your thoughtful support. I was honestly a bit overwhelmed by the "witch hunt" atmosphere, as I simply wanted to share my perspective from my career and the history of SF2.
It is very heartening to see a veteran like you advocate for a more welcoming conversation. I am grateful for your kindness and look forward to contributing more to this community as a person. Thank you for making me feel welcome.
It's very suspicious that the phrase "a veteran like you" comes up in sequential comments to different users in the same reply chain given that:
1] it's likely the context for a theoretical LLM on HN would be the one comment chain
2] once something appears in the context window, it's more likely to repeat itself, and once repeated a single time, it becomes all the more likely to turn into an infinite loop
3] Generally speaking, human beings aren't quite this effusively polite, while LLMs are
4] if an LLM was merely translating, the repetitive loops wouldn't occur?
It's not a "witch hunt" per se, in that I'm not out to "get" someone else, it's more like I want to affirm that a human being put some thought into what I'm reading, because otherwise there is no point in reading fictional anecdotes (one of the chief motivators to use HN is that it is more serious and less fictional than reddit, with more insightful commentary).
Wouldn't we be losing something valuable if HN became chiefly AI slop?
Wouldn't we be losing something if we _didn't even realize it had happened_?
I think it's worth asking, and guarding against. We live in a strange future already, but it's only one of many possible futures we can choose to construct going forward.
@PostOnce, thank you for your honest explanation. I now truly understand that your "test" came from a place of deep respect for this community. I apologize for the repetitive phrasing.
You caught me on "a veteran like you." As a Japanese banker, expressing high respect for seniors is an instinctive part of my culture. Since my English vocabulary is limited, the translation tool I use to polish my thoughts suggested that specific phrase, and I relied on it too heavily in my excitement to thank everyone.
I believe that in our AI-driven society, "Trust" is more valuable than ever. From the long-standing Japanese companies I study, I have learned that "Honesty" and "Diligence" are the only ways to build true trust. I am trying to practice this here on HN, writing every message with my soul to build a real relationship with all of you. I hope my "heart" reaches you beyond the translated text. Thank you for guarding the quality of this forum.
Although I don't like the meta-commentary, since it's better that threads remain closer to the original topic (that is, for here, Street Fighter), I want to offer a tip on your writing style that may help cut down future meta-commentary. It's simple: be worse. Don't polish as much. If you can write a bit of English yourself, then try to leave in words or sentences that are your own even if they're incorrect in grammar or spelling. (You might ask the AI if the overall meaning is still likely to get through, but leave the errors if there are any.) Also, use "inferior" translation services like Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/) and DeepL (https://www.deepl.com/) sometimes, making sure to only give them the exact text you want translated, not any preceding context.
And as another note, it's also sort of a meme that a lot of westerners who don't really know much about Japan will take some noun from the language and make a big deal about it, like you did with 鍛錬 and 見立て, as if the concept doesn't exist in other languages, or twisting the usage into something bigger than it really is, or even just making it up. It tends to have the effect that the writer is taken less seriously. 生きがい is the most popular misused one, I think. Less misused but still kind of questionable in a lot of places is かんばん, which is quite popular with software developers who took it from Toyota's practices. A made-up nonsense example could be: "瓶 (bin), or bottle, is more than just a bottle, it also refers to the Japanese art of bottling up your feelings, and how this leads to a more harmonious society."
The issue there is what you expect; when Sublime Text came out and later VS Code, they intentionally didn't have the same features as IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA had. The ecosystem of those is very impressive and feature rich, but for a lot of tasks that was overkill and the performance cost was too big.
X years later and VS Code is the one with the biggest ecosystem and therefore also has the largest and most complex addons.
Zed is starting from scratch again, relying on developers to create extensions. However, I'll argue that because Zed is Rust based instead of web tech based like Code, it'll be harder to get as big an ecosystem as Code has. Same with IDEs, some of the biggest plugins have corporate backers who pay people to develop and maintain them.
I love(d) Sublime and it's still getting updates from time to time, but unfortunately its ecosystem died five ish years ago, its package repository is a lot of "last updated 10 years ago". It's still a viable editor, but without community support it's not going to be good enough long term.
That said, ST (and its predecessor, forgot the name) set the standard for "lightweight" (lighter than IDEs) editors - Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.
TextMate? It's been surprisingly influential for an editor I've never seen anyone use; maybe in the US, where people actually buy Mac, it was different.
I didn’t notice that it hasn’t been updated since ‘21 (TM2), but I still use it every day. Just a reliable, minimal, fully native (no electron, etc) editor that is flexible enough to keep adding new bundles to. I’m sad it’s not in development, but happy it’s an oasis from AI coding.
I still love notepad++. Basically one of only a handful of apps I miss from when I used Windows. First release about a year before textmate, so for me it's the real og.
> Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.
True, but Zed is the only spiritual successor IMO, Atom and VSCode do not care about speed or snappiness, which is the nicest thing about Sublime Text (for me.)
Eh, I don't think it's really a problem. The much-vaunted VSCode ecosystem isn't actually all that useful imo, so it doesn't bother me that people aren't making lots of Sublime plugins. There's an LSP plugin which is basically all one needs.
Zed also pushed their AI features hard though. When it first came out it was like "your editor, but Rust / not Electron based, so fast", but two years or so ago they were pivoting hard to being an AI editor. Nowadays, thankfully, it's there but it's not intrusive.
The author also mentions missing the sidebar with files but it's one of the icons at the bottom left.
I think they added that due to some backlash... or I'm confusing this with Warp, the (also Rust based) superfast terminal application that first required a login, then pushed AI stuff.
This is why "social" piracy is a good thing (?? arguably, let's not get into the ethics), e.g. torrent sites with comments and a reporting and voting system.
That's what it looks like. I kind of get it, as there's no guarantee that a game they make available again will sell enough to cover the costs - it's as much a preservation effort as a commercial one.
For a lot of games it's just a matter of configuring dosbox and packaging it, I can't see how that would be very expensive. But for others it's a lot more involved.
But either case we talk about commercial products. The games are still copyrighted commodities to be sold. I assume they get licensed by the copyright holders to update them and sell them in gog. I do not see how a "charity"-based process would make sense or be honest here.
Just because a company doesn't have their IP available for modern systems doesn't mean they abandoned the IP, see also all the remasters and remakes coming out today.
That said, my gut feeling says it's mainly about them not willing to invest in it, because they can't see the economic viability. If GoG were to go to the rights holders and say "Hey lad, we have a platform and a lot of experience in reviving older games, you'll get x% of revenue", I'm sure some would be like "ok".
Of course, I'm also sure these rights holders have received offers like that from various parties for a long time now.
See all the remasters and remakes that didn't happen because they weren't legally able to. We are worse off as a society that enforces artificial scarcity on ideas than we would be if we returned to a world that did not have such bogus laws (not that long ago, but beyond the memory of anyone alive).
I think it's reasonable to argue something like, "some IP protection is good, but too much is bad, and we probably have too much right now." It would be impossible to calibrate the laws so that the amount of IP protection is socially optimal, but we can look at the areas where the protection is too much and start there.
It's not impossible at all. We should do 5 year copyright - 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing.
Copyright is granted to media creators in order to incentivize creativity and contribution to culture. It's not granted so as to empower large collectives of lawyers and wealthy people to purchase the rights and endlessly nickel and dime the public for access to media.
Make it simple and clear. You get 5 years total copyright - no copying, no commercial activity or derivatives without express, explicit consent, require a contract. 5 years after publishing, you get another 5 years of limited copyright - think of it as expanded fair use. A maximum of 5% royalties from every commercial use, and unlimited non-commercial use. After 10 years, it goes into public domain.
You can assign or sell the rights to anyone, but the initial publication date is immutable, the clock doesn't reset. You can immediately push to public domain, or start the expanded fair use period early.
No exceptions, no grandfathering.
There's no legitimate reasons we should be allowing giant companies like Sony and HBO and Paramount to grift in perpetuity off of the creations and content of artists and writers. This is toxic to culture and concentrates wealth and power with people that absolutely should not control the things they do, and a significant portion of the wealth they accumulate goes into enriching lawyers whose only purpose in life is to enforce the ridiculous and asinine legal moat these companies and platforms and people have paid legislators to enshrine in law.
Make it clear and simple, and it accomplishes the protection of creators while enriching society. Nobody loses except the ones who corrupted the system in the first place.
We live in a digital era, we should not be pretending copyright ideas based on quill and parchment are still appropriate to the age.
And while we're at it, we should legally restrict distribution of revenues from platforms to a maximum of 30% - 70% at minimum goes to the author. The studio, agent, platform, or any other distribution agent all have to divvy up at most 30%.
No more eternal estates living off of the talent and creations of ancestors. No more sequestration of culturally significant works to enrich grifters.
This would apply to digital assets, games, code, anything that gets published. Patents should be similarly updated, with the same 5 and 10 year timers.
Sure, it's not 100% optimal, but it gets a majority of the profit to a majority of the creators close enough and it has a clear and significant benefit to society within a short enough term that the tradeoff is clearly worth it.
Empowering and enabling lawyers and rent seekers to grift off of other peoples talent and content is a choice, we don't have to live like that.
I'm fairly certain that would not work at all for media such as sci-fi/fantasy books, where a system like this would result in people just forever reading older books which are free and effectively kill the market.
There is a limited amount of time to read in a day and the amount of 10+ year old content that is still amazing is more then anyone could ever read, and it's hard to compete with free.
I think video games is actually kinda an anomaly when it comes to copyright because they have been, on average, getting better and better then games released even in the recent past, mostly due to hardware getting better and better. Also any multiplayer game has the community issue where older games tend to no longer have a playerbase to play with.
Same could be said about movies/tv shows that rely on CGI up until somewhat recently where the CGI has pretty much plateaued.
I think the sales of books is pretty much uncoupled from the supply or price, as piles and piles of great books are available for free online or at the local library.
More recorded shows exist than any one man can watch in a lifetime, and yet there are multiple concurrent series ongoing right now.
I think the real kicker is that IP law was built around things like books, that don't suddenly stop working or need to be maintained, etc. Modern laws should take software into account and deal with it differently.
If it were modified to "99% of media has commercial profit collected within five years" it's probably pretty close to the mark, given how much is released and never reprinted/etc.
However, even 1% of a very large market is a huge tail, which is valuable.
Regardless, change the game. If you have a valuable, useful platform, and compete with other platforms for quality and delivery of service, then you're optimizing for the right things. If you have valuable media and the platform only serves to collect fees for the privilege of accessing the media, then you're optimizing the thing that is net negative for society, and ends up with adtech and degraded service and gotchanomics to try to nickel and dime you at every opportunity.
Imagine a world in which spotify and youtube and netflix had to compete on product and service quality, instead of network effects and legal technicalities. In which you could vibe code an alternative platform and have it be legally feasible to start your own streaming service merely by downloading a library of public domain content, then boot-strapping your service and paying new studios for license to run content, and so on.
The entire ecosystem would have to adapt, and it would be incredibly positive for creatives and authors and artists. There wouldn't be a constant dark cloud of legal consequences hanging over peoples heads, with armies of lawyers whose only purpose in life is to wreck little people who dare "infringe" on content, and all the downstream nonsense that comes from it.
Make society better by optimizing the policies that result in fewer, less wealthy, and far less powerful lawyers.
Before Windows / GUIs, everything was a TUI. Some of those applications were kept around for a long time even when Windows was mainstream, because they were faster. If you've ever seen an employee (or co-worker) work in one of those applications you'll see it. They can zip through screens much quicker than someone doing point and click work.
It's truly an amazing sight, our payroll system was all text based screens. I had a question and the clerk ripped through like 10 screens to get the information I needed, we're talking 200ms human reaction speed through each screen.
I also worked with a mythical 10x developer and he knew all the Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts. It was just like watching that payroll clerk (well, almost, we had under-specced machines and Visual Studio got very slow and bloated post v2008), I don't think I ever saw him touch the mouse.
> I don't think anyone would describe that kind of experience as hard to do?
Some would, especially the younger generation. Their attention span - or probably their brain chemistry - is strongly affected by constant stimulation, to the point where disconnecting from it causes anxiety and restlessness.
Not just the younger generation either, millennials are probably the first generation to be affected.
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