How many hoops will they have to jump through? Will those hoops change over time to continue to make it difficult or they still find ways to monetize those hoops while technically complying with the settlement? Will they still hold ultimate control over the ecosystem and use lawsuits and deliberate engineering to drive third-parties out?

Spoiler: The answer to all of the above is almost certainly going to be yes. These sort of agreements are toothless because they’re meant to be. The fight for right to repair is not a fight that is going to end as long as it’s more profitable to do the opposite.

The solution to all the billionaires taking everyone’s money is not going to be solved by finding the right billionaire. Nobody with a billion dollars gives a shit about you. They aren’t going to help you. They don’t even have the personal human context to have any understanding of anything you need help with, and even if they can afford to have someone tell them, and have the empathy to bother, they’ll still end up trying to fix in ways that don’t actually help you. They don’t get it. They won’t get it. They can’t. They’re living in a totally different universe. Money doesn’t measure success, it measures privilege.

Revenue and profit/loss are not the same thing. Revenue only counts the money they bring in BEFORE any expenses or losses, and is used precisely to avoid the issue you raised. That said, it is still possible to get around it, but it’s not quite as trivial as just spending more.

The difference, unlike a Playstation console, is that you also control the hardware and OS on a PC (mostly, and for now, at least; they’re working on fixing that)

This means that you don’t need to “jailbreak” it with a modchip to gain access to basic functionality like simply deciding to make backups and other copies for yourself or to simply not to run the DRM requirement since you don’t want to run that on your hardware that you own and you should not be obligated to. They call this piracy and cracking and say it’s illegal, but I say it’s a fundamental right. When it’s convenient they’ll tell you that you own the games, and when it’s inconvenient they’ll tell you you don’t own them and they decide what you can do with them. It’s like saying I can’t photocopy pages from or write in the margins of a book I bought and own, whether it’s digital or not. I reject that principle and refuse to abide by it, and you should too, and PC allows you to. Playstation does not, at least not with a nontrivial amount of work and a lot of penalties. It only requires a trivial amount of work on PC and generally will not allow the enforcement of any penalties (it shouldn’t require any work and shouldn’t enforce any penalties, but DRM and laws and always-online content are doing their best to make it difficult as much as they can)

The reality of the encroaching enshittification is real, but that is still the fundamental difference that a PC gives you, and I suspect it will always remain so. Never give up on this platform, defend it like a fortress and do not let anyone entice you away from it, only suffering leads down those paths.

Don’t forget about might makes right. What, you didn’t want to live in a world where big burly dudes with guns protecting wealthy pedophiles tell you what to do?

It’s pretty good. It’s right up Splattercat’s alley and he’s featured it several times.

I mean, I can already do that in Timberborn, so maybe not the most impressive example. The later example about basements collapsing due to the walls turning to mud? That sounds quite a bit more interesting, but it also makes me wonder how much they are overpromising here because that sounds wildly ambitious and unrealistic based on my current understanding of technology. I have no idea how they expect to be able to pull this off at anything resembling a reasonable simulation rate and fidelity without exactly the kind of pre-simulated, “you can do it here but not over there” situation he describes becoming inevitable.

It sounds really implausible. I wish them luck, because it would be really cool to see, but I’m not going to get too excited unless and until I can actually see the final result.

Of course that’s a possibility, but AI does not have responsibility. The question is who does?

Do I blame a train for hitting someone who steps onto railroad tracks when there’s a train approaching? It’s a machine. It doesn’t have responsibilities or opinions or agency. It does what it has been built to do, in exactly the manner that anyone with sufficient understanding of its operating principles could tell you, because that’s what machines do. The person or persons interacting with the machine is not absolved of any responsibility by how complex or inscrutable the machine is. It’s still a machine.

The question is, who is responsible for the person stepping onto the railroad tracks when there was a train approaching? Was the person trying to end their own life? Maybe it’s their responsibility. Or maybe the crossing signals failed and told them it was safe, and they did not realize a train was approaching. Maybe there were too many trees or signs or construction that was blocking their view. Is the train company responsible for that? Maybe. Did the brakes fail due to poor inspections or substandard work during the last maintenance? Maybe. Did the train have plenty of time to stop and the engineer was not paying attention? Maybe. These are all people, and groups of people, who may have responsibility. The only thing that’s certain is: The train doesn’t.

We, as a society, need to decide who is responsible for the possibility of a horrific consequence arising from the use of these sort of machines. Is it the person using the machine? The people who made the machine in the first place? The people who put it in a place where this person could easily use it? By assigning responsibility, ideally in advance of any horrific consequences, that provides a clear incentive for the people we deem responsible to actually start acting responsible and take the appropriate measures to avoid such horrific consequences that they might be held responsible for.