nfh

The one MMO I’ve meaningfully played, RuneScape, has open source replicas of its server from different points in time, that the community has made. I’m not gonna pretend it’s zero work, but a developer with the source code absolutely could do these things. It also doesn’t need to be perfectly compatible with the original one, you can replace a complex DB backend with something standard and less performant. Only runs on Linux, or MS Server 2k8? The community of people who care will figure it out.

Maybe a source code release would be preferable in this kind of option. EA just did this with a few Command and Conquer games.

If a multiplayer-only game turns down official servers, and you can’t self-host within the game, they should owe players a separate server binary they can run, or a partial refund for breaking the game. It should not be hard, especially if it’s a known constraint when they develop the game.

If it doesn’t work well without the Internet, it’s a bad investment. Features that require the Internet degrading a bit is one thing, but if a toilet or toaster can’t do its basic job offline, it was ewaste the second it rolled off the factory line.

The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.

Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.

I’ve been using Cinnamon for most of the last decade, but switched to Gnome3 recently, heavily customized to work like Cinnamon. Basically because Wayland is finally stable enough to use.

If Cinnamon gets Wayland support working well, that’s my choice. Otherwise I’ve got some Gnome3 configs that make it work pretty well, and I’d happily run it into the ground too.

The state of being old is a whole bunch of things that correlate with chronological age, but unless you know someone moving at relativistic speeds, chronological age is the only one we all move through at the same rate.

If you can hold on to the good bits of youth, like open-mindedness, and grow along dimensions like maturity, maybe youth doesn’t need to be wasted on the young.

There’s an important distinction here: “is a good idea” is not “is the right way to do it”. You can also keep kids off of dating apps by banning dating apps, banning children from the Internet, or even just banning children. All of those are horrible solutions, but they achieve the goal.

The goal should be to balance protecting kids with minimizing collateral damage. Forcing adults to hand over significant amounts of private data to prove their identity has the same basic fault as the hyperbolic examples, that it disregards the collateral damage side of the equation.

It’s all about the implementation. The Washington bill is treating diet products as similar to alcohol (check ID in-store and on delivery), which seems fine to me.

The NY law seems to be suggesting that dating app services need to collect (and possibly retain) sensitive information on people, like identification, location data. That’s troubling to me.

Am American, please keep it up.

I think I basically agree with you and the author here. People applying technology have a responsibility to apply it in ways that are constructive, not harmful. Technology is a force multiplier, in that it makes it easy to achieve goals, in a value neutral sense.

But way too many people are applying technology in evil ways, extracting value instead of creating it, making things worse rather than better. It’s an epidemic. Tech can make things better, and theoretically it should, but lately, it’s hard to say it has, on the net.