As much as I like Duckstation as an emulator:
Good for him. When the response to trying to protect the project and reduce harassment is… harassment and outlets insisting that they are shitting all over open source and continuing the false narrative that code was stolen? Fuck 'em. They don’t deserve the emulator and we don’t deserve it for letting them be the minimally opposed voices.
Yeah… I make it a point to not handle people with kid gloves when they are looking to make me convince them it is worth the mild inconvenience to not support a product with a long history of bigotry and harassment. Because, truth be told, it will never happen. Could give you a straight up handy and that would still not be neough.
So I’ll continue to make my disdain for people who knowingly use a product run by people who profit off of bigotry and harassment quite clear. Same end result but with the added benefit of making them feel slightly bad and me have a giggle.
Also, if you thought the above comment about ES-DE vs retroarch was “condescending” then… wow you are sheltered.
Its not even that much more convenient, truth be told. Yes, just double clicking to install a core is nice but you do that basically once per computer. Contrast that with downloading the emulator you like (most of which are installers on windows/mac and flatpak/appimages on linuxes) once per computer.
At which point… just use ES-DE. It automagically detects the majority of standalone emulators and gives you a nice controller based GUI to pick what game you want to play and so forth.
The unified control layout is nice-ish but basically every modern gamepad is “close enough” to xinput that defaults work. And for the more obscure stuff… odds are you are looking more toward a mister anyway or it is that you actually have a god awful claw for the four n64 games worth playing.
Yes, there is a lot to be said about being able to just double click to install (and I think that most gui package managers provide flatpak integration these days? So that might actually be there?). But if you don’t know how to install an application then you are going to have a bad time setting up retroarch/es-de in the first place and likely also difficulty totally ripping all your cartridges and yeah…
It isn’t about being “evergreen”. It is about having historical evidence.
Because maybe someone will do a study in 2030 and want to be able to compare to your UX research in the 2000s. If you wrote your paper properly they can reproduce your experiments (to the degree reasonable) and actually demonstrate progress.
Mentioned in the other thread but:
There is very much an “expected” source for this. Retroarch.
For those not aware, retroarch is a frontend for emulators that takes things farther than tools like ES-DE by requiring packaging and code changes to hook in to all the retroarch libraries to handle things like controller mapping, achievement servers, and hacks/cheats. The lead “developer” on retroarch has a LONG history of transphobia and other forms of bigotry toward emulator developers. REAL hate campaigns with the goal of either forcing emulator developers to specially support retroarch or to stop being developers so that retroarch can continue to claim that they have all the best emulators (even if they are years out of date relative to standalone…).
Duckstation in particular was targeted pretty heavily by them but stenzek (the lead dev) is a straight up G who fought back and refused to support the hateful shitheads. Which led to the “swanstation” fork for retroarch purposes. I haven’t done enough research on the difference in the fork but it seems to be significantly behind Duckstation in terms of features while letting retroarch claim they have the best. And if the repo I found from a quick google is THE swanstation repo… yeah.
that can be rather easily fixed without throwing all of the maintainers overboard (?).
As can be seen in the article as well as the issue thread and general contributions: Stenzek did not throw any maintainers “overboard”. All contributors were contacted and either agreed or their code was rewritten. That is 100% the proper procedure.
I can see there being bad maintainers that will come shouting to upstream with every little thing that does not work on their platform, but man that’s just insincere towards maintainers that will dive, analyze and help where they can to make it work.
The issue is not the “maintainers” unless you count the transphobic shitstains at retroarch as “maintainers”. The problem is the same thing that faces so many other emulator developers where retroarch distributes outdated and broken versions and then punts user support to the developers. Which means periodic waves of “Ugh, your emulator sucks. Why don’t you have feature X?” when Feature X has been in the emulator for years at that point but the “maintainers” at retroarch couldn’t be bothered to update their “core”.
That said, I do expect a third license change before this is all said and done. Because, based on the linked issue, stenzek et al are still perfectly happy with developmental forks for MRs and the like and there is likely a better license that is exactly what they want, rather than “close enough”.
At the end of the day: Ideology is great. But please understand the human aspect of things and maybe do some research to make sure you aren’t just arguing that people should bend over backwards to placate people who run campaigns of hate to force other developers to contribute to their project with a patreon that doesn’t pay out for that work (outside of rare exceptions).
Its the inherent disconnect between “News” and “Science”.
Science requires rigorous study and incremental advancement. A 2023 article based on 2022 data is inherently understood to be… 2022 data (note: I did not actually check but that is the timeline I assume. It is in the study).
But news and social media just want headlines that get people angry and reinforce whatever nonsense people want to Believe.
It is similar to explaining basic concepts. Been a minute since the last time I was properly briefed, but think stuff like “Do NOT say ‘theory’ of evolution. Instead, talk about how evolution is the only accepted justification based on evidence and research”
And, of course, the GOL article is written to make stenzek look like a jerk.
I like GOL as a blog a lot, but holy crap is Liam good at half-baked takes on nuanced subjects that mostly just rain shit down upon people.
More likely it is related to the years of harassment from the transphobe “running” retroarch and his horde of hateful shitheads who harass emulator developers until they work for him. Duckstation is far from the only emulator that has been targeted by this and “Swanstation” has always been incredibly sketchy for a “fork”.
If you spend years torturing open source developers, this is what happens. Which… has no real impact on the “legitimate” users but will hopefully bring more eyes to why we actively should not support retroarch and their campaigns of hate. Especially when tools like ES-DE do an amazing job of just scanning for what emulators you have installed and “making it work” without demanding developers make tweaks to support their framework.
Good on the workers. But my worry is that Boeing is a sinking ship and this will end up as anti-union propaganda when they (not the doors that fall off mid-flight) are what is blamed for Boeing collapsing.
Not sure on ApeLegs but they have increasingly been disabling linux “support” for the Battlefields because of their anti-cheat.
I don’t know how popular ApeLegs actually is. But for a lot of live games? Those are making MASSIVE bank and anything that can hurt the economy can kill the game. So a lot of studios actively just disable/block linux support because the added effort of making sure everything works in Proton is too big of a risk. Because nothing would increase Linux marketshare quite like free vdollars in Fortnite.
It really fucking sucks. But I find that many studios (like Digital Extremes) are really good about making it clear that even though they don’t officially support Linux, they are very much fans of Proton (and Warframe has had a lot of bugfixes specifically FOR Proton support). Whereas EA has spent the past few months systematically disabling Linux “support” for every game they develop.
No. There is every reason to “defend yourself”. The key is to actually be aware of what research and efforts are out there and minimizing your risk profile any time you are dealing with a black box.
I mean, it is known that people can pick locks. Do you plug your ears every time you hear someone talk about how doors can be compromised? Or do you give up on everything and remove every single deadbolt in your home?
Or… do you do a bit of research and figure out what you can do to make your home harder to break into. Whether it is sturdier screws, a reinforced doorjam, or other methods?
I can’t speak to monero specifically
But:
Back in my pure research days it was always fun to guess what the latest “big thing” was actually about. It was especially fun when you would be looking for funding opportunities and see really weird stuff that made no sense for the org sponsoring it but would have made perfect sense for a different 3LA.
It was ALSO real fun to totally never notice when certain funding opportunities dried up and then there was a big push in the news about how we need to outlaw technology those opportunities totally didn’t already compromise.
Like, for the better part of a decade The Big Thing was graph analysis techniques. And the number of kids who had no idea they were basically writing algorithms to process social media (especially twitter) was downright sad. And the people who DID realize what their work was geared toward? They applied for jobs where they got paid a lot more to do exactly that without needing to pretend it is actually about data storage technologies or optimizing cell tower load.
And… let’s just say that most of those algorithms ALSO apply toward cryptocurrencies and transaction logs (since they had great applications for bank transactions…) and even doing a number on tumblers and so forth.
While I agree this definitely feels like more of a threat than an action, it IS worth understanding the many times that tor nodes have been compromised. Exit nodes are a well documented mess (and have many of the same vulnerabilities normal VPNs do) but eavesdropping and traffic analysis are also probabilities based upon how much of the network any given org has access to.
If that NGO was doing hinky stuff or just doing a sloppy job? Those cops might actually have a LOT of actionable data that just needs a bit of processing.
Which is why it is always important to understand what your risks and benefits from a privacy related tool are. People often think “I’ll just put everything through a vpn/tor” which DRASTICALLY increases their risk profiles. But they also don’t understand how tor works well enough to even know what it gives them over a traditional vpn (as opposed to “Dark Web” stuff which is a different mess).
If you need an “off the shelf, low effort” IDE then you pick whether you are using VSCode or Vim/Emacs and then go to youtube and google “best plugins for ${LANGUAGE} in ${EDITOR}”. And you get basically a minute of copy pasting to have it set up to about the same level of optimization.
Aside from that? The reality is that everything takes time to learn. It took you time to learn your preferred emacs config. It took me time to learn default vim and then what my preferred vim config should be and how to take advantage of it. Just like it took time to learn the editor that came with python on windows for years (still might?).
Which gets back to this being a boomer ass article.
Yes. A much less boomer-coded article would be better.
But as someone who has actually used a lot of the various IDEs over the decades and keeps coming back to vim (and is already expecting to go back to vim within a year because of invasive copilot shit…): Those niche editors? They are either genuinely bad ideas (think TempleOS levels of insanity) or they became plugins for every other IDE. I like vim a lot but emacs is the same (actually emacs is an OS with a text interface but…). And many of those plugins ALSO exist for vscode and atom/sublime and so forth.
Because good (uncopyrighted…) ideas propagate. That is development and design.
That… is a really shitty meme that misses the point?
If you actually look at what the overlay exposes, the User still has the ability to pick specific channels, control volume, power, etc. All they really lose are the DVR (good example) and all of the user friendly stuff related to tv guides and the like (bad example).
I assume this is just AI engagement farming bullshit that someone fell for and posted to lemmy but… I would actually say it would make more sense if the overlay were almost inverted.
I REALLY hate articles like this
Saying we “lost” this software just shows that people don’t understand what software design/engineering is.
Basically every screenshot of the “lost” TUIs look like a normal emacs/vim session for anyone who has learned about splits and :term (guess which god I believe in?). And people still use those near constantly. Hell, my workflow is generally a mix between vim and vscode depending upon what machine and operation I am working on. And that is a very normal workflow.
And that is what we want out of software development. The good ideas move forward. The less good ideas become plugins for sickos. Because everyone loves vscode right now but… Microsoft is shitting that up REAL fast with copilot and just wait until every employer on the planet realizes that and ban it.
And the rest just ignores the point of an IDE. Yes, taking your hand off the keyboard to touch the mouse LOWERS YOUR EFFICIENCY*. But it also means you can switch between languages or even environments trivially. Yes, it is often more annoying to dig through twelve menus to find what you want or talk a co-worker through how to do basic git operations that would be three commands. But holy crap I hate the people who “can’t work without my settings” that mean they are incapable of doing any “live” debugging or doing any peer programming where they aren’t driving.
Back in the day we had plenty of people who were angry that not everyone was using vi and a bunch of tcsh scripts to develop because it clearly meant they didn’t understand what they were doing and were too dependent on compilers and debuggers. And it was just as stupid then as it is now.
It very much sounds like ifixit are actively asking influencers/reviewers to compare it to at least one of those in the videos.
Just from the screenshots in the tweet/article:
I would argue that is less transparency and more overlaying the skybox texture. In the city map with the Pinky you can’t actually see anything behind that wall, you just see the skybox.
Could just be “bad” examples but this makes sense. My understanding is that PC DOOM tended to use additive geometry in these cases so that the skybox is literally just a bigass box around the map. Whereas I assume the Saturn version had to do some magic to fit everything and may have used a different technique. Hence the ability to just overlay that texture over everything.
And “it is already out there so they can’t take it away”:
swanstation is already a few versions back feature wise? But, regardless, it will rapidly become outdated as new “tech” is added to emulation and issues are found with third party libraries or code. Good software needs good support and just having a ten year old hash is almost always worse than useless.