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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • This, and Bangladesh. All places that rely on wage slavery, child labour and unethical working conditions, because that which is unethical is also very cheap.

    You can’t really compete with slavery, because again: it’s very cheap, and the way the Chinese state leads Chinese farmers and villagers into social lock-ins, whereby they legally become stuck in an area where there’s only grueling, deadly, soul crushing and back breaking labour that leads to a life of poverty becomes a problem for the rest of the world if it’s used to manipulate the markets.

    I do of course realise this article is about “too big to fail” companies that corner every market, but I also think that the west and the east needs to think about what it means to partake in a race to the bottom where wage slavery is part and parcel of the market. It creates conditions whereby competition involves who can make the most horrible living conditions in the world, and do you really want that?

    There are Chinese labourer families who have been trying to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” for generations now, and it’s all thanks to other nations enabling the Chinese regime - especially the west.


  • This is why Godot is so important and that source available can be something the EU has to consider for all newly designed games. Sorry, small, mid and big time game studios, and screw you publishers, what we need is to make sure that the barrier to entry for game developers is significantly lowered. What, you think I’m taking about video game conservation? Leave that to AccursedFarms.

    What I’m saying is that you can more easily pitch games to publishers, using assets and engines that are already “standardised”, like Bethesda’s several Rube Goldberg machines, if they are available. I’m looking at Fallout London as saying to myself: why isn’t this on Steam, Switch, and every other platform Fallout 4 can run on, being sold by Bethesda?

    Even split prices, one for people who already owned Fallout 4, one for who recently purchased Fallout 4 if they don’t have Fallout 4 - if you wanna be pedantic. But the point remains the same: these lovely modder devs, though they shouldn’t be forced, could have pitched this game to Bethesda, even as an “off-universe” game. Whatever.

    But then we remember the Fallout 76 Store. Oh my god, no. And DMCA takedowns, claims of copyright infringement - even though “modified works” doesn’t exclude software - and what about actual live services and competitive games? Like could the community make the server instead? Can it be something even the Olympic Committee has a hand in, so the game can be vetted for the Olympics?

    Like update your EULA. “May be used, modified and deployed for free if it’s used for education and development purposes”. I’m not a lawyer, so take them scribblings with a grain of salt, but something like that would really just add an extra level in participation in schools, clubs, organisations, etc, even as an easy way to recruit and receive games and new worlds, for free.

    Free the engine! Free all of the engines! NOW!!! “The secret sauce” fallacy has been stupid, is stupid right now, and will continue to be stupid into the future - unless we do something about it.

    Free the engines!














  • TL;Dr licensed firmware is garbo - open firmware ftw

    This - is what we need.

    The only ones who can really push the envelope on getting RISC-V into the hands of consumer, and indeed up to an IPC comparable to ARM, are companies like Deep Computing and Si-Five.

    The biggest problem in the computing world, bar none, are not the predatory companies, vendor lockins, or proprietary operating systems, it’s always been licensing. This is why BSD existed in the first place, because a $1000 a month per seat to copy a file without pulling and pushing bits around is a bit too much, even if it was the 70s.

    Similarly, in a time of green washing, eWaste and even planned obsolescence, one of the things that help to underpin all of these afformentioned evils is secret sauce firmware.

    No matter what you say, if you don’t have access to the source code for firmware and bootloaders, you’ve got a lifetime set by the vendor based on how long they can actually support the hardware - because employees cost money. You can’t realistically expect a company to support something they’re not making money on anymore, and they’d most likely just want to sell you new hardware.

    This is where RISC-V comes in swinging. I’m not saying that all RISC-V hardware will come with open firmware, but the ball is rolling and with it we can finally bridge the gap spanned by tech companies, where the average Jane or Joe can in effect easily modify their firmware code, albeit through security principles of course.

    Unlike Open Source, Open Firmware is a bit trickier. Decades of industrial precedent, and indeed vendor lockins the OEM’s are beholden to, like proprietary BIOS, makes it that much harder to establish - especially when designing an entire ISA and getting it to prefab is a Lord of the Rings length journey. There is no griffin shortcut.

    No doubt I’ll have naysayers. Just mentioning open firmware in the average matrix chat riles the gallery, as is the style, but even the likes of NVIDIA are opening up their code (thanks, AI) to the point where NVK is not that far from stable, untainting your kernel. Yay.

    Everybody ♥️ open source, don’t they? But how about giving some love to Open Firmware? In the FUTURE 🐙 we’ll hopefully have vendors and foreign interests shoved tf out of our hardware, and good riddance, because they shouldn’t be in control of it in the first place.

    I await your ire.

    And shout outs to the libreboot maintainer. What in the ever loving Carmack is FSF up to? Libre ain’t a brand, it’s a philosophy.