Sony can only take it away because you didn't own it.
I digitally own SimCity 3000 Unlimited from Gog. The copy lives on my NAS. The NAS could break, sure, but so can a CD.
Can I hold it? Well, sort of. The same way I can back up my physical CDs to a hard disk, I can also back up digital things I truly own to a CD/DVD/BD or other media.
As long as the thing I'm holding in my hand is all I need to be able to make use of what was given to me at the point of sale, I see no issue.
On the other hand, Valve, who I think most would agree is a company that has been on the less bad side of digital distribution for the most part, has sold "physical" copies of games that actually still required Steam to install and use. And in that case, from the layperson's perspective, it sure seems like you can hold it, and yet you don't own it.
So IMO this argument just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
When I brought half life 2 there was a lag of about 2-4 years before I could play it for the first time - I didn't read the fine print, and on a dial up connection I couldn't get past the steam client updating in a reasonable amount of time, mind you I was able to download much larger Linux ISOs over time frames of a month+ through resumable downloads.
Not really an issue these days but it certainly was back in the day
Steam's DRM is still an issue today and it means that you have to get cracked copies of most of the games you paid for in your library if you expect to ever own them. I spent some months without an internet connection only to find the steam games I'd been playing offline just fine suddenly refused to launch until I allowed steam to phone home to grant me permission to play the games I paid for. Steam could go out of business at any time and all your games would simply stop working.
I'm aware, and I'm choosing GOG when I can now, though even then I see phoning home (or attempts to) happening (opensnitch is useful for that https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch) - I've paid for some titles 2-3x over which is frustrating, admittedly I don't have the physical media from the first time which is on me, but it's frustrating seeing single player games wanting to phone home
AFAIK Steam really has three things you could consider part of the DRM strategy.
- The Steamworks DRM, which is a lightweight EXE packer. Seems about as simple as UPX. Presumably it goes and checks that you own the app ID via Steam RPC on startup.
- Checking that the user owns the app ID via the API. A simple check that's pretty simple to bypass using a Steam emulator.
- And then finally the ticketing system, which allows third-party servers to validate that a user owns a given game according to Steam.
Of them the ticketing system is the most serious: it's something you can't really bypass easily. However, it also is only applicable to things that require servers. I know in Valve's own games, its only something that comes up with game servers, and I don't even know if it's forced on in their dedicated server. It seems like a stronger version of dedicated servers that used to have CD key checks.
DRM is DRM, and these mechanisms impact your ability to use things the way that you should be able to. That I would never deny. However, I will say that because it's relatively lightweight, for software that sticks to just what Steam offers and doesn't try to get creative, they're mostly only going to prevent casual piracy, and I think the main purpose of these mechanisms is mostly to just clear the technical bar for being a copy protection mechanism by law. When it comes to preserving these games beyond the end of the Steam service, it probably won't be a big deal, and it will actually be third-party DRM options like Denuvo and SecuROM that are harder to deal with and could potentially pose a threat for preservation and keeping access to games you own.
So while I don't really like Steam DRM, severity matters. If "no DRM" was just simply not on the table, I'd take Steam-native DRM as a good second choice. It is still a problem that it is technically illegal to break those locks to just be able to use something you bought with your own cash, but I think that's something we need to fix in the law, and I think we can, and honestly, despite the direction things are going, I do believe we will. Just a shame that I'm less sure I'll live to see the day at this point.
ultimately it means that all of the games in your library will stop working as soon as your computer has been offline for whatever length of time steam feels is "too long". I recommend getting a cracked copy of every game in your library to make sure that you will still have access to what you paid for if steam shuts down or you lose your internet connection.
Well, the Steamworks DRM simply poses no threat: a skiddie can crack that one. There are tools that can do it automatically. For stuff that depends on the Steam API, you can probably keep a copy of one of the popular emulators; normally it's enough to drop them next to the EXE. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, I could go into my steam apps folder and fix the problem immediately.
Having to crack things at all just to play them is bad. But, if it's easy to do it yourself, it is still better than going the route of downloading stuff from dubious sources. There's a whole ecosystem you have to understand to know what you can trust with piracy and not everyone knows where to look.
For the ticketing system, it's kind of a non-issue because that's a server-side mechanism. If a game requires that, it requires a server and won't work offline at all anyway.
For Denuvo, SecuROM, Themida, VMProtect and others... Yes, that stuff is an actual threat, but Valve doesn't make people use those. (Valve also doesn't make people use Steamworks for DRM either, and there are in fact games in my library whose Steam depots are free of any DRM at all and happily run outside of Steam with no Steam needed.)
The reason this is a worthwhile point is because it means games on Steam are not automatically DRM-encumbered and the steam apps folder for the game may just work as-is.
How big of a difference this makes definitely depends on the kinds of games you play. Obviously the triple A games on Steam are, with rare exception, DRM'd to the gills. The older games and indie games, a lot less so, sometimes none at all.
You have to check of course, but probably a good idea to do so before trying to find cracked/pirated versions.
Based on the fact that Claude Opus 4.8 decided I needed a cybersecurity exemption to debug a stupid pure virtual call bug (basically virtual method called inside of destructor) that I had already found, oh boy, I sure would love to have my 3D prints analyzed by Anthropic safe guards. We should also ensure that nothing shaped like a dildo can be printed without scanning our face and genitalia and keeping it on file with Persona while we're at it.
I'm not mad at you for suggesting this, you're right, I'm just generally aimlessly angry and ready for this world to burn.
I'm getting a lot of refusals these days from multiple LLMs on multiple fronts for silly stuff, a lot more than I had for a while. If this is where things are really going, I think open weight models have a big future.
"H.R. 148867 makes all large language models subject to safety certification, introduces penalties for unlicensed training and use of uncertified models"
Frankly who cares about dildos when your personal freedom and private property of you and your family is at stake.You can buy uncountable dildo models in a shop.
I recently was in Venezuela, I have been in Cuba. I am a native spaniard. There you have a group of people that took control of the weapons in the country and uses it to basically enslave the rest of the country.
When the people in power have automatic weapons and you don't there is basically nothing you can do to defend yourself from the abuses of power.
That is a real thing the people in power have wet dreams and would love to do in any country, including the US.
Ummm, well, seems in historical perspective that quite a few instances of rebels using improvised molotov cocktails against tyrannical governments. When it's a country that the US disapproves of, seems they support this activity as "freedom fighters". But when this behavior occurs in protests inside the homeland, obviously the authorities come down hard.
Don't ask me. I think the focus on sex things is utterly insane. However, even on Hacker News many people definitely seem extremely concerned at least about people under 18 having access to Internet pornography, which to me, clearly isn't even remotely close to the biggest problem adolescents are facing.
In America we're worried about 3D printed ghost guns. Why? Ostensibly it's because ghost guns are showing up more at crime scenes, since 3D printing is just so accessible these days. How many gun deaths do 3D printed guns currently account for? As far as I know, something on the order of magnitude of around 0.01%, at least in America. That number is probably mostly small because we never actually really did anything about regular gun violence.
This is not a new pattern. Nuclear energy has very few fatalities in its track record. Shockingly few when you consider its reputation. Depending on how you count it, it is pretty much a rounding error by any reasonable measure. Meanwhile, we send at least somewhere around 10,000 bodies to the morgue every year as a result of pollution from natural gas power plants. How many from nuclear? Probably less than one on average. Certainly nowhere near 10,000 no matter how you shake it, twist it or bend it. Even the dumbest and least reputable studies couldn't force the number to half as high, which is pretty funny to me. Is nuclear fission still the future? Given the density and reliability of energy production from fission it's hard to entirely count it out even in a mostly solar + battery future... yet here we are, with politicians arguing about the safety of ~0 deaths per year energy production method vs >10,000 deaths per year energy production method.
Does it matter that politicians are so interested in regulating sex when bigger issues are at stake? Well, yeah. It's no less alarming even if it seems trivial. Not everyone has to pick every battle, but to me free expression is my bugbear so I give a fuck when it's in the mouths of politicians. The apparatus for suppressing expression never stops where it starts. Never. It wouldn't be right if it did, but the point of trying to come up with something that sounds like an obvious net good is that it can make people more forgiving to implement a terrible idea and set an awful precedent.
Which, of course, is why it's pretty likely in the near future you will need a driver's license to reply to this comment.
Since everyone is vibe coding everything anyway I fully expect there to be a Windows 3.x display driver that works this way soon. I'm sure people in the retro computing hobby feel a certain way about this, but it's definitely also hard to deny the amount of "Project Structure" in README and "// ---- Input Handling ---------------------------------------------" snippets I've been seeing lately in a lot of new homebrew and other projects. (Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them. I'm sure humans do this too, but AI does it more.) I don't really care that much personally although it's silly that people kind of have to be wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it for the foreseeable future.
It used to be a big thing in the nineties: I've got old .asm source code of mine where I used to do that.
But somehow LLMs love to insert dashes everywhere: dashes in source code an em-dashes in prose. Just why?
Did they parse lots of early code and thought it was cool to insert, in modern programming languages, comment lines full of dashes?
> Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them.
Oh yes, all the time. And besides the fact that there are the off-by-ones errors, it of course looks horrible in Claude Code CLI seen that what you see is not what the LLM did output (because they vibe-coded their "real time game engine" that changes characters, for no reason, on the fly).
It's 2026 and we've got "intelligent" machines doing this:
I feel like the long dashes in comments as dividers is something I’ve seen more in machine-generated code, eg templates, WYSIWYG editors, etc. No doubt I used to be pretty l337 back in my day, and I think I’ve seen it more from tools.
I wonder if AI training sets have some bias towards the way the “peers” wrote code.
My guess is that the humans they had in the loop for RLHF just simply preferred the code because it looked superficially tidier. I have the strangest feeling that they didn't always have top notch engineers in the loop at all steps.
I suspect this is also how LLM prose gets so utterly bad.
Of course, for indentation and ASCII graphics, it would be less prone to breaking constantly in this way if it were not a next-token predictor.
OK, well, I'm getting very tired of all of the terrible AI-generated articles.
I made a longer reply that discusses why I think this article is bad on top of the fact that the writing is absolutely fucking horrid, but a single person could theoretically pump out hundreds of these per day if they wanted, so having a nuanced critique for each of these is going to be pretty hard.
There's only one solution, and that is flagging and removing all AI generated articles. Fullstop.
Just because some people choose to write poorly using an LLM doesn't in itself make all AI generated content bad. In can in fact be far better than an article written by a human if instructed reasonably.
Yeah, no, if I can tell it's AI generated, that means it has the same garbage writing style that for some reason LLMs can't help but pump out. And if some human person thinks that's fine to post, they either don't care/didn't read their own post, or they have terrible taste.
And again, it's a practical issue anyways. You can have Claude generate hundreds of these. I've already personally seen multiple blogs where there are multiple fully written long articles being posted per day. These even occasionally make it to Hacker News. Did the person who generated these actually read them? Probably not.
Most importantly, it is unacceptable to pass off AI generated prose or images as if it is human expression. It's one thing with code where the primary point of it is to be executed, but I have zero interest in people who can't formulate their own thoughts into writing. I don't see how it is any better to submit AI generated articles to Hacker News than it is to respond to people with AI generated comments.
Humans aren't infallible, but the point of content isn't the content, it is the ideas, and the ideas are valuable because of the work put into them. AI slop articles are a serious problem because they superficially look like something where a lot of effort is put in, as the models will happily make bold claims and justify them into the ground no matter how untrue or unjustified those claims are. There is a feasible future where AI generated content is also valuable because of the effort put into them. It certainly happens on occasion today. It just isn't what we're seeing here right now on Hacker News. And because many people here (certainly myself included from time to time) often skim the articles or sometimes don't even actually read them, it is important that the community put some effort into weeding out slop content, AI or human, that fails to justify its claims. The rising tide of AI generated crap is making this task harder and more annoying.
This isn't something I'm ever going to relent on, either. So I will have to leave it up to HN to decide if they would rather ban us all for complaining or come to reasonable senses and agree that there is no sustainable way to allow blatantly AI-generated content onto the front page. I don't view this as an ultimatum so much as just an observation extrapolating off of what we're seeing today: nobody has really made me feel there is any compelling point to allowing AI generated crap on here. If anything the further it gets the less supported arguments in favor of it are seeming justified.
The explosion in quality from better models is always around the bend.
Like I said, the model quality is not a problem. They can trivially write professionally. Even a two year old model can. If they write poorly, it's because they are asked to appeal to the lowest common denominator of clickbait.
Actually I disagree, it's pretty apparent that modern frontier LLMs are nearly completely incapable of writing good prose for some reason. I'm not sure if it's the RLHF phase or what, but even when you explicitly tell them to try to avoid the cliches it's never enough. They're geared toward writing heavily punchy, low-substance prose, and it shows up everywhere in their output, even in places like documentation and just normal chat replies.
The exact way in which the models are fucked up seems to depend on circumstances, but I think right now one thing I've noticed out of the latest versions of Claude Opus is that it really really likes to use the word "honest" in its summaries. "What Remains (The "Honest" Part)". I figured this was maybe something to do with it just repeating the system prompts but no. It turns out the word "honest" does appear in some fragments of system prompts in Cluade Code, but it doesn't appear to be anywhere where it would've been in the context of my recent runs.
I think this is a tuning issue and that eventually, someone will figure out a good way to prevent models from getting skewed this way.
Still, the bad prose quality is not really the biggest issue. In fact, it's kind of handy that the prose quality is shit because it makes it easier to tell when someone just doesn't seem to care about what they're writing. If the prose quality was really good, yet the amount of effort put in was the same, we would be having an even worse problem right now.
I ask GPT 5.5 to write professionally or in a moderately formal tone and it does. If you are producing garbage output, there are only three explanations: (1) you don't have a system prompt to obtain targeted output, the kind you need (2) you have a badly written system prompt (3) you have a weird bad model.
The world is bigger than Claude and an oversimplified worldview.
If you haven't even read good quality AI written articles, you have either been wilfully blind to them or you have a bigger problem, because you surely haven't avoided them.
This is just bad. The writing is more horrible Claude garbage. It also begins with this quote from Durov:
> Despite its claims, it reads users’ messages and shares them with third parties.
Note this claim. When it goes into its first smoking gun,
> WhatsApp [...] automatically backs up your entire chat history to iCloud or Google Drive
> This is what Durov meant. This is why he said ~95% of messages end up in plain text on Apple/Google servers.
This is the closest the article ever comes to proving the claim at the front. Note that nothing in this claim implies that Meta can or is reading your messages, only that it is "sharing" them with a third party, so we still haven't actually successfully justified this quote.
It then rambles over just about every security controversy WhatsApp has ever had: bugs, design flaws, etc.
Okay. Then it mentions that sometimes when you're talking to a business it's actually Meta servers on the other end of the encryption, I guess. This again seems like it doesn't really prove anything.
I am not saying none of these issues are problems, but this literal dump of AI output into Medium can't even justify its primary claim. It just keeps throwing more shit at you and hopes you've forgotten what the bold claim at the front of the article actually said was, since it isn't really true.
I do not believe Matrix is a scam, but it has almost all of these problems in some form aside from the stupid Cloud Backups issue, only its a bit more complicated. It has CVEs, generates tons of metadata and several places where homeservers could attempt to attack your privacy.
Durov's platform, meanwhile, offers very little in the way of end-to-end encryption and of course generates a ton of unencrypted metadata, so I am not sure who he's fooling. It seems like they continuously brag about Telegram not being able to solve the E2EE key management problem by pointing out that other solutions are imperfect, whereas Telegram just doesn't have one. Congratulations?
Maybe he wanted to make sure a lot of copies of the evidence were floating around. Surveillance capitalism is like a free unlimited backup service you can't restore from.
I find this choice interesting. Vulkan is a sensible choice given the game is multiplatform (and of course they mention MoltenVK right in the announcement.) Despite that, I still find it interesting that a Microsoft subsidiary would make this choice given that Vulkan is a direct competitor to Direct3D and that Microsoft seemed to only begrudgingly continue to support OpenGL and wgl. (Am I hallucinating, or was there not a period of time where the graphics drivers shipped from Windows Update simply omitted OpenGL support, leaving you with only the terrible OpenGL 1.4 software renderer?)
The bedrock lineage is microsoft's attempt at microsoftifying minecraft. The team behind bedrock are responsible for showing the world the supremacy of DirectX.
Bedrock is far behind on features and is far buggier compared to java edition. A ground up C++ rewrite is noble beginnings. Unfortunately time has shown that they only planned to get it to an MVP necessary for some gross monetization tactics targeting children and not really a genuine interest in improving the tech, growing fandom goodwill, or creating new art.
You could run java literally anywhere it matters with not too much effort, but ios store terms would never allow for mods anyway (neither would ps/xbox/ninty store probably), so you could just as well redirect effort to optimize for platform specific audiences, AKA in this case kids wielding their parents' credit card.
Sure and I don't argue that. But it also wasn't fully there. This past couple of weeks Codename One introduced some big missing pieces:
* Level builder/game designer
* Proper 3d that works natively everywhere (direct 3d on windows, metal on iOS/Mac)
* Support for native win32, Linux and mac - real native with no JVM, 5mb binary
* Native performance for some edge cases (low level SIMD API etc.)
You're right that mindshare is a huge part, but there were also many important missing pieces especially on the deployment front. I think that with good tooling and a royalty free pitch this might open some doors that were previously closed to Java.
Getting to major studios would be an uphill battle but since they acquire indie studios the path goes through there.
Another thing to note is that Mojang had already commissioned a C++ port of Minecraft for the console versions, which they then abandoned in favor of Bedrock. The original console port ran better, was less buggy, and had a nicer UI for controllers than Bedrock. Bedrock is basically an extension of Minecraft Pocket Edition (the smartphone port of Minecraft) so I imagine that they shifted to Bedrock so they didn't have to pay to implement the same features on Java, console, and Pocket Edition whenever they updated the game. The console version was developed by an external contractor, which is probably why they chose to give that up instead of Pocket Edition.
"Bedrock is basically an extension of Minecraft Pocket Edition "
This seems crazy. When MS bought Mojang, why didn't they start with the console port for Bedrock? Even if some other contractor, it would be a starting point better than the phone version?
This isn't really true, the code works like most cross platform codebases where most of the code is common and then there's a bunch of platform-specific backends that handle graphics, sound, input, etc. They used the same gameplay code for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Playstation Vita, Xbox One, Playstation 4, Wii U, and Switch, so clearly there's not really much keeping it stuck to a single platform. A recent leak of the legacy console source code revealed that they also had an internal Windows port to make development easier, although you still need a controller to play.
As for the internal windows port, that's how most console development is done nowadays. Gamefreak (the pokemon people) does build of their games for PC which is neat considering how different the switch is compared to the differences between playstation/xbox and pc (those are just amd cpus and gpus on the inside, whereas the switch uses some nvidia soc)
It started with that, yes, with Pocket Edition, but then that codebase got used for the console editions. I guess the temptation to monetise was too strong, and monetising Java was probably a lot harder and would spark a lot more outrage.
The Modded Minecraft community is basically all Java, and yeah, I think the Microsoft team on this have done a good job, but given how much awesome stuff modders give away a monetisation gambit is going to bring loads of ire for relatively small gain. "Better Than Wolves" is an entire mod which exists because one solo was angry about Wolves being added to Minecraft and they were like "I can do better than that" and of course the only way to show that you're serious was to uh, make a mod which is better than the wolves. IIRC it's a mechanical power system, water wheels, wind mills, gears and then simple machines to connect.
I don't think there's much chance Sony or Nintendo would have blocked the publishing of a Java version of Minecraft, if that had been on offer in place of Bedrock.
The rules are always flexible for huge games, especially when they'd otherwise be an exclusive for a competitor.
My experience has been that unless you are using the basic graphics options of Bedrock it performs worse at the same render distance, and even with basic graphics the perf is not much better. With Java version getting Vulkan rendering I suspect it'll out perform bedrock even without mods.
Not to mention bedrocks "improved" graphics look like trash compared to the shaders available for modded Java.
It's simple. Microsoft the new owner has no idea what Minecraft is about.
Or at least the subset of Minecraft that I play: complex builds and automated farms done in survival not creative. At that level the combat they keep adding to is ... just getting in the way of my building.
I think the problem is that Minecraft caters to a huge range of tastes. I fully agree with you, I’d much rather have more options for automation and building fun machinery but my son is deeply into the PvP side of things where the new combat options are hugely appealing, and lead to new ways of playing the game. That’s barely scratching the surface, you’ve also got the speed runners, the boat racers, the people using it as a place to shoot weird films, the drop map obsessives, and the speed bridgers competing to bridge from one point to another as fast as possible. It’s almost impossible to accommodate everyone all the time.
> my son is deeply into the PvP side of things where the new combat options are hugely appealing
But is he not using mods because he doesn't want to, or just because he hasn't got into it yet? Perhaps soon he'll run into a must-have java mod and drop bedrock.
Personally I learned about MC and even that there are mods by helping my then 12 year old daughter install them...
Oh he's hard into the world of Java edition mods, my point was more that they're adding combat options to the core game because there's a huge audience demanding more combat options.
> Microsoft the new owner has no idea what Minecraft is about.
They've had 12 years to figure it out[0]. Now sadly they've spent those 12 years working out how best to milk every last microtransaction and merchandising cent out of the property rather than actually listening to anyone and improving the game(s) but whomst among us could have predicted that outcome?!
Microsoft the publisher also cares about other OSes, and each studio does whatever they feel like including publishing on mobiles and all game consoles.
Microsoft the Windows/XBox division has other priorities.
Direct3D 12 is Vulkan under the hood. GL is the real competitor, and it provides legitimate accessibility to small developers, which is why the industry is extinguishing it.
Is Direct3D not dead? I’m seeing no major releases in years, no notable features pushed (much less teased), and no team to speak of at MS. Is there a team still? Does MS plan to do anything with it? Seems like it’s Bush-era Internet Explorer at this point.
I definitely had this feeling early on in my career, but it did flip around somewhere around halfway through.
"We're not shipping? Well, that's a bummer, but also, what a relief! If building it that was this hard, I can only imagine how bad shipping it would've been; now we can delete that code and with it all of the maintenance we would've had to commit to for years."
The personal attachment just had to go eventually. It proved not to be terribly helpful or healthy anyways.
I digitally own SimCity 3000 Unlimited from Gog. The copy lives on my NAS. The NAS could break, sure, but so can a CD.
Can I hold it? Well, sort of. The same way I can back up my physical CDs to a hard disk, I can also back up digital things I truly own to a CD/DVD/BD or other media.
As long as the thing I'm holding in my hand is all I need to be able to make use of what was given to me at the point of sale, I see no issue.
On the other hand, Valve, who I think most would agree is a company that has been on the less bad side of digital distribution for the most part, has sold "physical" copies of games that actually still required Steam to install and use. And in that case, from the layperson's perspective, it sure seems like you can hold it, and yet you don't own it.
So IMO this argument just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
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