confidentcrescent
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User ID: 423
Apologies for the late response.
That one does seem to have been created before the original went down, fair enough.
(Although it's not the only possibility and maybe they're wrong) that Bambu didn't make this small change is evidence they expect someone would fix the repository.
I think it's more likely that two things are true
- Companies only move quickly if really forced to
- They're waiting out the worst of the negative publicity
If I was a soulless corporate bastard in charge of killing this open-source product off I'd get the teams working on this product to rework the APIs in a way that just happens to break this method and look to deliver that in 6-12 months. This gives plenty of time to work on it, plausible deniability as to why the workaround broke, and hopefully everyone has forgotten by then.
Not personally, but the multiple people re-uploading the repository are.
But are they, actually? FULU isn't a person so while the organization could be sued it seems much less likely for any of the people behind it to be vulnerable. It's hard to tell in a foreign language but that "dafik" fellow seems to be fairly anonymous, with a common name, few projects, and little information.
I'm also not sure if just hosting the repository is legally problematic. Most of the claims Bambu made sound related to development of the repository and it's not clear to me that any of the people rehosting intend to continue development.
confidentcrescent
11d ago
The FULU repository went up May 12. The developer took his repository down on April 23rd.
Apparently he received the threats from Bambu in late April. Unless some very fast-paced discussions happened behind the scenes, he could have had no idea a replacement would go up when he took his repository down.
Furthermore, is FULU maintaining the code or just re-hosting the original? Now the developer is out of the way all Bambu needs to do is make a small change to obsolete the backed-up version.
And if Bambu still tries to sue him, Louis Rossman has pledged to pay his legal fees.
He pledged $10,000. This is good of him but probably insufficient for even a simple legal case, and doesn't cover the personal cost of dealing with this either. Fundraising might cover the rest if the developer actually gets sued. I wouldn't want to take that bet. Would you?
confidentcrescent
11d ago
the hobbyist sued for bypassing EOL-not-EOL software can get enough people and attention on their side to recover any financial damage and Streisand the game company.
We have examples now that show this isn't how it will work in practice. I think the recent case around Bambu Labs' software is illustrative.
I won't go into all the details but what I find notable about that case is that, when served with a legal threat, the developer who made a workaround to now-removed functionality immediately took it down without any attempt to fight a legal case. This happened despite a significant number of people interested in his success and despite the developer appearing to believe the threat was legally unsupported.
It shows very clearly that legality is not sufficient to protect game preservation efforts. Under the current legal system threats of legal action often work even if the target believes the case is meritless.
The problem with adding regulations is that they may be applied to smaller devs.
I'm not convinced the requirements from Stop Killing Games will be much of a concern for small developers. They're far less likely to use DRM and turning off Steam's DRM would put basically all of them in the clear of even your more stringent requirements. They're also far more likely to stop supporting a game because their company has gone bankrupt, at which point fines for non-compliance are irrelevant.
I'm far more concerned that SKG and similar laws will be added to the pile of laws that are effectively unenforced than I am about seeing them enforced strictly on small publishers.
confidentcrescent
12d ago
For the future, I support removing regulations on buyers circumventing end-of-life software, rather than adding regulations on sellers.
I like this in theory. In practice I think the massive disparity in legal resources will make this no different from the current situation.
If the game company with lawyers on call says their game doesn't count as end-of-life because of some transparent bullshit and threatens to sue a buyer sharing how to circumvent their restrictions then the likely result is that the buyer gives in or goes bankrupt fighting an expensive legal case (and then gives in).
The government might be inconsistent and heavy-handed but they do actually have the resources to threaten a company like Activision if enough people demand it.
confidentcrescent
2mo ago
That doesn't improve things at all. Helping an intern write code is more work than writing it yourself without the intern involved. You need to check everything carefully and give detailed explanations on how to fix any problems.
Adding more intern-level code would make most development teams slower.
confidentcrescent
3mo ago
I'll take your word for it. It's definitely plausible on a calories/dollar metric, I was more surprised to hear you can eat that much rice without running into problems with stomach size. I find it quite filling and it's not a snack food you can nibble on throughout the day.
confidentcrescent
3mo ago
I think our opinions are reasonably close. My opinion is that the program should be tightened up to curb misuse, but limiting starvation and malnutrition in your country is usually good and a more limited program which does so is worth having.
I'd approach fixing the problems differently, but I'm a lot less concerned about how exactly the problems in SNAP get fixed than about agreement that they are problems.
confidentcrescent
3mo ago
The three examples I listed above:
- A drug user is spending significant amounts on expensive and non-essential drugs rather than food
- A obese SNAP recipient is spending and eating significantly more than they need
- A SNAP recipient spending $50 on goods which provide little to no nutrition is clearly not on a tight food budget
As originally brought up in an earlier comment by @tomottoe and then mentioned by the OP.
confidentcrescent
3mo ago
First, if you increased your food budget to double your needed caloric intake I would still say you're overspending, even if your expenses are relatively low compared to others. It'd just usually not be any business of mine if I'm not paying for it.
As your current food budget is showing, you don't need that much food. Ideally SNAP would be giving exactly as much as is needed to top up the person's budget to the point where they can eat healthily, but targeting a program this accurately is unreasonable.
Second, is this actually how a significant amount of obese people are eating? Getting fat on rice flavored with butter and salt sounds difficult. Nor do I think people would be complaining about an obese person purchasing a cart full of vegetables and rice with SNAP - I think the complaints implicitly include that they saw carts full of typical junk food that is easy to overeat and get fat on.
confidentcrescent
3mo ago
But we agree these cases are indeed waste and not proper uses of SNAP, right?
The OP seems to hold the idea that these kinds of spending are perfectly fine and that objections to them are just the conservatives hating specific kinds of poor people. That idea is what I'm disputing - I think it's both out of line with the stated goal of SNAP and also the conservative conception of the purpose of charity.
Before we discuss whether or not this waste is worth it and whether it can be practically reduced we need to be on the same page about whether it is actually waste or desired results of this program.
confidentcrescent
3mo ago
The idea underlying all of these objections is one of deserving. Certain poor people don't deserve access to government food assistance. Those who do don't deserve to derive any pleasure from eating beyond not starving.
No, the underlying objection is to the lack of need. Conservatives view charity as primarily to cover a lack of ability to provide for yourself.
All three examples given in the prior post show a lack of need:
- A drug user is spending significant amounts on expensive and non-essential drugs rather than food
- A obese SNAP recipient is spending and eating significantly more than they need
- A SNAP recipient spending $50 on goods which provide little to no nutrition is clearly not on a tight food budget
Looking at how the US government describes the SNAP program I think the conservative view has the right of it here:
SNAP provides food benefits to low-income families to supplement their grocery budget so they can afford the nutritious food essential to health and well-being.
The three people described above can afford nutritious groceries with fewer SNAP benefits than they're getting. They further appear to be putting the saved money towards other luxury items. The purpose of SNAP is not helping people purchase luxury goods. If you think it should be I welcome you to donate your own money and ask you don't try to take mine.
confidentcrescent
3mo ago
What would it take for you to believe that the managers have actually done some reasoning here?
The easiest way to show reasoning is to summarize and share their thoughts. If they have ideas about where and how this tool will lead to improvements then they can just tell people why.
From their perspective they see a potential phase shift in how their organization operates and they want to make sure that if it's real they capture it and if it's not real then maybe they've wasted a little bit of budget on tokens. That's really not a hard risk reward tradeoff to take.
As described, this hypothetical manager seems to have no better reason than FOMO to get this tool. If the tool would improve a specific task he would have no need to justify it as a "potential phase shift" - he could just say it will be useful for the specific thing. He wants it because it's trendy and he's afraid of being left behind.
Pushing a new technology because other people are excited about it is not reasoning; it is succumbing to hype.
confidentcrescent
4mo ago
I think Arjin responded to the first part more eloquently than I can. I'll just add that to the degree that this was pushed by scientists as a group then scientists should share blame for it as a group.
People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.
I've seen this argument before and the aim is usually to imply that because some of the lower-level scientists were correct you should not lose trust in science from failures of science-driven policy. Sorry if that's not what you're getting at here.
That idea is bullshit because nothing has changed in the pipeline of science to policy. When the public next gets some more fancy science-based policy it won't be from the random scientist who has sane opinions but from the same kind of people who got things wrong last time. If scientists want credit for being correct they need to actually speak up when the public is being told incorrect science. Otherwise what the scientists are saying among themselves is irrelevant to whether or not the public should trust the science that gets to them.
confidentcrescent
4mo ago
When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?
The same two things every technical expert wanting to preserve their credibility should do:
- Say only things you are confident about
- Stay out of the political side of debates
They violated the first by making a lot of confident claims that later turned out to be incorrect. They violated the second by advocating for the implementation of a bunch of specific solutions which had non-medical trade-offs.
If they'd done neither and kept to relatively generic advice and a little bit of carefully-phrased speculation they might get criticism for being useless but would have avoided much of the trust loss from saying wrong things. I think you would have also seen much less aggressive fights over lockdowns and masking without The Science pushing specific solutions.
Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.
A lot of the credibility current institutions are burning came from past institutions getting things right. When they said that vaccinating everyone against measles would get rid of measles it actually did do so. The same was not so for the coronavirus.
Past institutions could just have been lucky, but I think a more sensible default assumption is that they got better results because they were better.
confidentcrescent
4mo ago
I will clarify my previous comment. I would like you to explain why expressing the same opinion as multiple large AI companies indicates a bias against AI.
confidentcrescent
4mo ago
LLMs aren't beings, people, or minds
When I see sentiment like this, which literally chastises a matrix of numbers, I have to assume a non-neutral bias
Most, if not all, of the prominent companies in this space call their products "artificial intelligence" and advertise users treating them like people. They refer to them thinking, having skills, and doing things.
It is extremely frustrating to see an accusation that the above poster has an anti-AI bias for treating LLMs as advertised by many of the companies selling them.
A quick browse through the marketing materials of these companies will turn up many examples, like:
confidentcrescent
6mo ago
I decided to try Sorcerer in 5e so it's possible some of the problem came from having to make changing my spell list a multi-session affair. I think they've since made the UA which let you change spells without levelling up official which is a positive change.
However, I did feel like 5e gave a much greater pressure to have something optimal if you want to to properly contribute to a fight. Preparing multiple options to diversify across different saves, different damage types, and single-target vs multi-target ate up that list quickly.
confidentcrescent
6mo ago
Honestly, I think the concentration mechanic and spell nerfs that 5e did are the bigger sticking point for me.
They probably had more impact on my enjoyment when actually playing, but I have some sympathy for these two changes because they did at least partially solve issues that were widely complained about in 3.5e.
Spellcasters ignoring the recommended adventuring day to dump everything immediately made fighters feel irrelevant, which is less of a problem now that the spells are weaker. I also don't think anyone liked the pre-fight buff dance that happened whenever a party got to surprise their foes, which has been killed off entirely by concentration.
I disagree but I can see someone liking those changes enough to outweigh having less interesting and impactful spells.
On the other hand, the loss of proper prepared spellcasting feels like almost entirely downside since we went from having a choice between wizard and sorcerer to two flavors of sorcerer.
From what I remember of 5e, I think the "ritual" tag was supposed to handle a lot of the situational utility stuff.
I think they might have initially intended this, but most of the best utility spells got left off the ritual list. That was a good decision. Characters being able to cast Detect Magic and Leomund's Tiny Hut effectively at-will was enough of a problem. The idea of dealing with characters who get to cast Fly, Fabricate, or Clairvoyance any time you let them sit still for half an hour should fill any DM with dread.
Rituals were a mistake and if WotC ever gets tired of making slight iterations on 5e I hope the next edition removes or reworks them. At least make them limited by something other than just time!
confidentcrescent
6mo ago
5e's equivalent problem is only having space on your preparation list for a very short list of spells. It also sucks to take Fireball and find out that you actually needed Lightning Bolt or something situational like Feather Fall.
I preferred the 3.5e system because in this situation it means I still got to use that ideal spell once, and the larger quantity of memorized spells gave more space to take something experimental or niche without leaving a massive gap in my spell list.
confidentcrescent
8mo ago
Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
Firefox released a patch to fix a sandbox escape* just a few days ago. Properly sandboxing a program has not been solved; it is an active problem that consumes a lot of developer time and current solutions likely still have many holes to be found.
Crooks mostly rely on users downloading and running scripts because it's easy and it works. Writing exploits against browsers isn't worth the effort when you can socially engineer people and get the same results.
Most sandboxing is also bad for performance. Javascript on a random webpage generally doesn't need to perform well but a recommendation algorithm will.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
Any cut-off aggressive enough to meaningfully restrict denial-of-service attacks would make algorithm-writing functionally impossible for the majority of users and probably also prevent most of the possible algorithms people would like to write.
* I can't see the bug report but based on the reported severity this appears to be a between-page sandbox escape rather than fully leaving the browser.
confidentcrescent
8mo ago
Technologically it's perfectly possible to let every user write their own algorithm
I think the technical hurdles to this are a lot higher than you expect. I'd like to see someone make a shot at doing it anyway, but I'm confident it will come with some significant trade-offs. A basic algorithm is probably more likely.
The main problem is that you need to run this somewhere and neither of your choices are good.
Running this on company hardware brings large performance and safety risks. Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop or virus. Performance because search algorithms over large datasets are computationally intensive at the best of times, and code written by random strangers is not the best of times. Solving both of these without severely limiting the ability to create an algorithm would be a miracle.
Running this on a user's computer instead raises challenges around getting the data into the user's computer to be searched. If you're looking at Twitter and want to get today's tweets from accounts you follow that could be thousands of records. Download speed limitations will ensure you will never be able to run your algorithm on more than a tiny fraction of the full site.
confidentcrescent
9mo ago
The cops wanted the body cameras because they thought it would clear up false accusations/spurious complaints.
That doesn't match what I remember. Why did it take a national conversation to get body cameras in place if both police officers and reform advocates wanted them? Who else could have been getting in the way?
Additionally, unions in multiple large cities have demanded raises for wearing body cameras. This would be a very strange move by the unions if officers in these locations wanted body cameras.
confidentcrescent
9mo ago
Possibly! If we fix that problem, keep the body cameras, and the recruitment crisis goes away then the body cameras were probably an unalloyed good.
But as all three happened around the same time it's hard to untangle how much each of the former two contribute to the latter. Police certainly don't seem to have all-positive opinions of body cameras and I can see a number of reasons why even a good cop would hate wearing one.
confidentcrescent
9mo ago
OTOH, the widespread adoption of body-worn cameras has been a nearly unalloyed good
I think it's a bit early to say that. Haven't a lot of places been starting to struggle with poor police recruitment on a similar timeline to rolling out body cameras?
It could be that the loss of privacy from body cameras isn't relevant to the recruitment problems. Body cameras could even be helping recruitment by reducing officer concern over false accusations. But until someone identifies and fixes the cause of the recruitment problems I'd be reluctant to conclude body cameras aren't relevant.
Personally, I think I'd find it quite unpleasant to have a camera and microphone active for most of the time I spend at work. Especially when those recordings could be released to the public.
It wouldn't surprise me. Keeping under the radar is a good strategy for actions you don't feel you can defend, whether that's morally or legally.
I only partially agree. Yes, the data will be there (probably). But having to trust anonymous people in faraway countries has significant downsides; it's harder to find them and there's a lot more risk they could serve you something malicious. Reputation and community are hard to build when trying to avoid companies playing legal whack-a-mole.
Also note that none of this requires the data be legal. To bring this back around towards the original argument about enabling game preservation, if you're happy to download hacked-up .exes or .dlls from an anonymous individual in Russia or Brazil then you can do that right now! You don't need to legalize anything to get this outcome. The pirates probably have most games available already.
I think a lot of SKG's support comes from people wanting a better process than this, one with less risk and which doesn't require significant technical know-how and internet savvy. I don't dislike the idea of making reverse-engineering and fixing old games legal but I just don't think it alone gets us there.
I don't know the 3D printing space well enough to comment on the plausibility of this scenario, but I do hope it comes to pass.
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