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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I’ve disabled personalised ads on YouTube and I see this sort of shit all the time. I’ve given up reporting them because 90% of the time the report is rejected. I don’t even understand the rationale for rejecting it because it’s an obvious a scam as a scam can be - ai impersonation, fake endorsement, illegal advertising category. It’s a scam YouTube.

    I don’t even get why these ads even appear. YouTube has transcription & voice / music recognition capabilities. How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it? Or search for duplicates under other burner accounts and zap them at the same time? Or having some kind of randomized audit based on trust where new accounts get reviewed more frequently by experienced reviewers.










  • I once developed an electronic program guide for a cable TV company in New Zealand and I’d lose my mind if I had to use timezones. The basic rule of thumb was:

    a) Internally you use UTC religiously. UTC is the same everywhere on Earth, time always goes forward, most languages have classes that represent instants, durations etc. In addition you make damned sure your server time is correct and UTC.

    b) You only deal with timezones when presenting something to a user or taking input from a user

    Prior to that I had worked for a US trading company that set all their servers to EST and was receiving trades through the system which expressed time & date ambiguously. Just had to assume everywhere that EST was the default but it was just dumb programming and I bet to this day every piece of code they develop has time bugs.




  • Yuzu gave them the opening to sue though. If they had been more circumspect - “Oh this is to develop homebrew / indie games nudge nudge” then maybe Nintendo wouldn’t have unleashed the lawyers or done so ineffectively. After all it wouldn’t be Yuzu’s fault if some wicked website corrupted their pure intentions by releasing device keys or patches that allowed their emulator run commercial games. But they were more blatant than that.

    Also from an empathic perspective, of course Nintendo were going to sue. Yuzu should have known they would since that’s what console platforms do when something interferes with their profits. Yuzu is doubly bad since it interferes with hardware sales and game sales unlike custom firmware / cartridges which only affect game sales.

    Of course the genie is already out of the bottle. Yuzu’s source code and binaries were on github for anyone to clone / fork. All the games are out in the wild. The piracy will carry on. I think it’s fair to say the NSP is effectively dead as a platform at this point. If a NSP2 turns up this year, as rumored, then I expect it will have revised anti-piracy measures and potentially a heavy online service aspect to go with it - it’s far easier to detect pirates and wield the banhammer when a device is online.



  • I would be surprised if their sub service was not a failure. In fairness the service has hundreds of games but most in the last 5 years has been garbage and beyond that, where is the value? As a consumer I might as well buy old games on GOG, Steam or wherever at my discretion rather than be locked in to a sub that costs the same and have nothing to show for it afterwards.

    These services need thousands of games, across a range of publishers. Even better if they support downloads or streaming as options. So basically I don’t see subs working unless it is large platform owner who can incentivize publishers and thousands of titles to partake in it.


  • Subscriptions are taking off, just not Ubisoft subscriptions because most of their games are derivative shit.

    And personally I don’t have an objection with the concept of subscription as an option. It’s no worse than streaming music or videos, or renting a DVD / VHS back when. But whatever the service is will have to have a LOT of content, not just back catalogue but new stuff too with fair & reasonable terms for people to want to subscribe. If Ubisoft wants to ever see its stuff streamed it will have to be as part of some other, better service than the one they offer that’s for sure.