I’ve never played either the original or the remastered version of Oblivion. I got into Bethesda games via the Fallout series rather than the Elder Scrolls series.

I think I did see a friend, who was a big fan of Daggerfall, play that. And I went back and played Morrowind with the open-source GemRB engine. But I never did Oblivion.

EDIT: Sorry, via the open-source OpenMW engine. GemRB was for the Infinity Engine, and I also did those games.

EDIT2: I’ve also never played Elder Scrolls Online, as I wasn’t really interested in an online experience. I did play Fallout 76, which is online, but that was only because Fallout 5 wasn’t coming out any time soon, and the most that was going to be available for a long time was Fallout 76.

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

I think that this is “video” as in “moving images”. Photoshop isn’t a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it’d be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up — not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise — to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

I don’t think that this is the “end of truth”. There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we’d have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

I can imagine an Internet-connected camera — as on a cell phone — that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn’t stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy

I don’t see any official announcement of cancellation, but honestly, between its development not going well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil_2

The game was originally announced at Ubidays 2008, with almost a decade of silence before being re-revealed at Ubisoft’s E3 2017 conference, although no release window or target platforms have been mentioned.

Its development was characterized in the media by uncertainty, doubt, and rumors about the game’s future, and has been referred to as vaporware by industry figures such as Jason Schreier due to its lengthy development and lack of a release date.[1] In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development period of a AAA video game, at more than 15 years. In 2023, the creative director, Emile Morel, died suddenly at age 40.

And Ubisoft as a whole having problems recently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft

…my bet would be against it coming out. Or, even if it does…I mean, people who wanted the game want it because the original Beyond Good and Evil was a solid game. That first game came out in 2003, 22 years back. That’s a long gap in time, technology, and people. Someone could probably sit down and try to come up with a list of examples where you had one very successful game in a series and another that far down the road, and my guess is that in most cases, the next game doesn’t live up to the original.

tries to think of an example where someone’s managed something like this

I like Carrier Command 2. That came out 33 years after Carrier Command, though it certainly didn’t meet with the same level of relative success, and there was an (unsuccessful) remake of the original between the two releases.

Starfield was very stable for me.

Fallout: New Vegas was unstable, especially near the end of a run. And I’d swear that it was worse on the XBox than on the PC. Not just longer load times, but plenty of times that the thing would die when loading an area.

My impression from playing both was that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were pretty solid when you started playing a game — well, okay, if you get the post-release patches in place — but that the game became less-stable over the course of a run.

The loading times also got a lot more painful over the course of a run. Fallout 76 and Starfield did much better in that respect.

As much as I hate the idea of remastering all their games instead of just making another fucking game,

I would pretty happily buy the 3D Fallout games remastered for the Starfield engine. Higher texture resolution. Use some of the features that were added to their engine in the years subsequent to release. Capable of being rendered at frame rates that modern monitors can display. Eliminate some of the weird ragdoll stuff they used to have. Modders have improved the models a lot, and I’m sure that that’s doable. Another popular change for Skyrim modders was doing things like opening up the world (because you didn’t need to load towns separately from the outside world on modern computers), adding more foliage and other things that computers couldn’t handle back at release, adding modern shader effects, and all that.

I mean, sure, I’d also like to have Fallout 5, but I suspect that the cost of doing a remaster is a lot less than a new game, and the earlier games are getting old enough that they’re kinda hard to recommend. I mean, if they release Fallout 5 in the early 2030s, the last game in the mainline series will be Fallout 4, 2015, and before that, Fallout: New Vegas from 2010 and Fallout 3 from 2008. That’ll be a huge gap, if you hope to get players to play the series. If you rewind a comparable 15 years from Fallout 3, you’re at 1993. That’s the original Doom release. That’s a pretty enormous gap.

Skyrim got the LE->SE (well, and AE) path, so it got updated to be more-playable over the years. The Fallout games are still running on the old stuff.

You’d still need to turn it on if it’s in hibernate. Well, you might not need to push the power button, might have a laptop that can, while off, key off the lid switch. But the laptop’s still off when it’s hibernated.

That depends on how you define the web

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]

gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)

This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!

I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on the Threadiverse. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.

How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?

Gopher predated the Web.

I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with <em></em>, <a href=""></a>, and <h1></h1> anymore, for example.

It doesn’t work with private DNS servers or forward DNS over VPN.

Like, you want to have it query some particular DNS server?

From man 5 resolved.conf:

   DNS=
       A space-separated list of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to
       use as system DNS servers. 

       For compatibility reasons, if
       this setting is not specified, the DNS servers listed
       in /etc/resolv.conf are used instead, if that file
       exists and any servers are configured in it.

If you specify your private server there, it should work. For VPN, I mean, whatever VPN software you’re using will need to plonk it in there. Maybe yours is not aware of systemd-resolved, is modifying /etc/resolv.conf after systemd-resolved has already started, and it doesn’t watch it for updates?

In my /etc/nsswitch.conf, I have:

hosts:          files myhostname mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns

I’m assuming that the “resolve” entry is for systemd-resolved.

kagis

https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2022/03/wireguard-dns-config-for-systemd/

With systemd-resolved, however, instead of using that DNS setting, add the following PostUp command to the [Interface] section of your WireGuard config file:

PostUp = resolvectl dns %i 9.9.9.9#dns.quad9.net 149.112.112.112#dns.quad9.net; resolvectl domain %i ~.

When you start your WireGuard interface up, this command will direct systemd-resolved to use the DNS server at 9.9.9.9 (or at 149.112.112.112, if 9.9.9.9 is not available) to resolve queries for any domain name.

It’s been a long time, but IIRC Windows’s file dialog also remembers your recently-used files for quick access in the file dialog, and I assume that Explorer has a thumbnail cache.

It looks like GTK 3 has a toggle for recently-used files:

https://linux.debian.user.narkive.com/m7SeBwTP/recently-used-xbel

While the guy sounds kinda unhinged, I do think that he has a point — he doesn’t want activity dumping breadcrumbs everywhere, unbeknownst to him. That’s a legit ask. Firefox and Chrome added Incognito and Private Browsing mode because they recorded a bunch of state about what you were doing for History, and that’s awkward if it suddenly gets exposed. There should really be a straightforward way to globally disable this sort of thing, even if logged history can provide for convenient functionality.

Emacs has a lot of functionality, but I don’t think anything I use actually retains state. If emacs can manage that so can oyher stuff. Hmm. Oh, etags will store a cached TAGS file for a source tree.

thinks

Historically, bash defaulted to saving ~/.bash_history on disk. Don’t recall if that changed at any point.

There’s ccache, which caches binary objects from gcc compilations persistently.

Firefox can persistently cache data in the disk cache or for LocalStorage or cookies.

System logfiles might record some data baout the system though they generally get rotated out.

Most of the time though, I don’t have a lot of recorded persistent state floating around.

DNS

There’s systemd-resolved. I don’t know if you mean that it has some kind of limitation.

twitter doesn’t work for me rn)

https://nitter.space/moschino_bunny/status/1457773412957376530

Frankly, this should be implemented with something like a combination of:

https://github.com/QazCetelic/lemmy-know

Lemmy Know (let me know) is a lightweight CLI application / Docker service that monitors Lemmy for reports on posts and comments and sends notification. These can be sent to a Discord channel with a webhook or as MQTT messages (schema), which is useful for more complex setups with e.g., Node-RED.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mqtt/

MQTT (aka MQ Telemetry Transport) is a machine-to-machine or “Internet of Things” connectivity protocol on top of TCP/IP. It allows extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport.

https://github.com/DevelopmentalOctopus/ha-buttplug

Buttplug.io Integration for Home Assistant

https://intiface.com/central/

Intiface® Central is an open-source, cross-platform application that acts as a hub for intimate haptics/sensor hardware access

Some collection of hardware devices from:

https://iostindex.com/?filter0Availability=Available%2CDIY&filter1Connection=Digital&filter2ButtplugSupport=4

That’d permit for, say, having message events drive a state machine to control devices or something like that.

There are some existing video games that incorporate LLMs or diffusion models. So in one sense, that’s probably very doable.

But I think that it’s probably going to be a slow process. There are probably going to be dead ends. I kind of suspect that early games, even if they’re technically-novel, probably will suffer the same problems that past video games did before they matured. End of the day, a video game needs to be fun, and just throwing a new technology like a powerful graphics card or a fancy natural-language parser or whatever at it doesn’t get you to that fun game. I think that it’s going to take quite some years of game developers iterating to incorporate generative AI stuff well.

That being said, there are some things I’d like to see tried.

• My guess is that it’s probably possible to create to develop some sort of social-media-based video game that generates a choose-your-own-adventure style video game, remembering story branches generated by other users to take advantage of human-assisted creation, and trying to show “top” story forks. Like, make the bar low, use voting or link tracking or something to determine what story branches people like, and show those.

• I’d like to see some kind of system for tracking world state that isn’t purely based on having an LLM look at the entire preceding text for context. That’s a pretty inefficient way to store world state, and implementing game logic at the LLM level is, I think, going to be problematic. Think of something like, oh, a game system like Inform/TADS/glulx-based interactive fiction. You have objects and properties and a game engine that handles tracking them and their interactions. But you try to get an LLM to generate text for those objects.

• There are some games that use diffusion models, either statically or at runtime, to generate illustrations, where the number of permutations would be impractical for a human artist. The ones I’ve seen have been adult-oriented; I don’t know how the field has developed, and there may well be a lot more out there now.

• One thing that I think could be done today is to start using procedurally-generated voices. Generative AI can do pretty decent voice synthesis. Video games are good at doing procedurally-generated text, but if you do that, you don’t get voice audio. That’s not really a game genre, but it’s a way in which one could provide some neat added functionality. I think that to really take advantage of this, there’d need to be a training corpus of text annotated with emotional information and such, but I’ve seen people doing this in a usable form for game mods.

I don’t think that that’d be very analogous. He explicitly said that he wasn’t going to do the Hyperloop himself, just proposed it as an idea that someone else could implement.

That being said, you could dig up something that Musk had said that he would do that he didn’t. considers FSD on Tesla vehicles is probably the prime example.

before they agreed to fix the price at $1 in September.

Probably not going to be enforced, given the context, but I believe that this is illegal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing#United_States

Price fixing is an anticompetitive agreement between participants on the same side in a market to buy or sell a product, service, or commodity only at a fixed price, or maintain the market conditions such that the price is maintained at a given level by controlling supply and demand.

In the United States, price fixing can be prosecuted as a criminal federal offense under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[3]

Criminal prosecutions must be handled by the U.S. Department of Justice, but the Federal Trade Commission also has jurisdiction for civil antitrust violations. Many state attorneys general also bring antitrust cases and have antitrust offices, such as Virginia, New York, and California. Further, where price fixing is used as an artifice to defraud a U.S. government agency into paying more than market value, the U.S. attorney may proceed under the False Claims Act.

Private individuals or organizations may file lawsuits for triple damages for antitrust violations and, depending on the law, recover attorneys fees and costs expended on prosecution of a case.[4][5] If the case at hand also violates the False Claims Act of 1863, in addition to the Sherman Act, private individuals may also bring a civil action in the name of the United States under the Qui Tam provision of The False Claims Act.

Under American law, exchanging prices among competitors can also violate the antitrust laws. That includes exchanging prices with the intent to fix prices or the exchange affecting the prices individual competitors set. Proof that competitors have shared prices can be used as part of the evidence of an illegal price fixing agreement.[5] Experts generally advise that competitors avoid even the appearance of agreeing on price.[5]

I would guess that it’s probably not much by way of change — theoretically, maybe just a single line patch — to cause this check not to take place.

That’s actually a really interesting question.

I understand that Apple takes issue with packages that can themselves “take packages”. But historically, I don’t believe that Google has. Of course, Google also hasn’t done the registration thing historically, either.