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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: March 1st, 2026

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  • They didn’t ‘prevent’ anything. Ask Dolphin themselves.

    https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/07/20/what-happened-to-dolphin-on-steam/

    TL;DR: Valve asked Nintendo of America’s layeers if they want it on the store and they said no. No pursuit. No DMCA. No threats. A legal opinion. Valve gave a copy of the response to Dolphin and said if they wanted it on the store they needed an agreement with Nintendo. i.e. instead of benign ignorance from Nintendo, to get a literal “emulate our games” approval from Nintendo. Dolphin wisely decided not to.

    In Nintendo’s response they mentioned Dolphin includng the Wii encryption key which if you are old like me you will remember being a meme almost 20 years ago (https://gizmodo.com/wii-officially-hacked-338713). Nintendo takes issue with how this was achieved (physically modifying the chips with a tweezers) but again, have never IIRC attempted any legal action to prevent it. So, “no we don’t approve” was always going to be the answer. Dolphin appear to have either expected Valve to risk its own position, or to slip under the radar, to distribute its software. In the end, the status quo was maintained: Valve do not publish or distribute (or prevent you installing yourself through Non-Steam-Games) Dolphin, Dolphin did not seek approval from Nintendo, Nintendo does not pursue Dolphin. Except Dolphin got a nice bit of tech news coverage 15 years after its launch and some nerd cred for kinda-not-really taking on Nintendo.




  • Programmer turned photographer turned back to programmer.

    I was really enjoying the online photography scene the 2000s and early 2010s. I used to do street photography, ask interesting people to take their portrait, blag a press pass and take photos of up and coming bands (“sure why not” is a crazy answer to “can I inexpertly point my flash directly at Florence Welch as she performs her last tiny gig before stardom”).

    I started doing work for wannabe models (ModelMayhem mostly) and from that got requests to do paid personal events, eg weddings and engagements. Especially when I moved abroad to places where I was basically self employed, this was a nice little occasional gig. But it was work. Regardless of why they chose me, they wanted their photos to look the current fashionable way, they wanted them by a certain date, they wanted specific moments and they wanted them perfect even if they weren’t perfect in real life. It sucked all the fun and creativity from it.

    Coupled with the overloading of the internet with (elitist snob coming) mundane and repetitive photography content and the death of discussion and appreciation of thoughtful photography, it eroded my love for it on both ends.

    I’m old and have kids now, I’m trying to get back into it. It’s hard to build back up that courage to take out a camera and snap a photo. Before it marked you as unusual, but at least as potentially an expert or artist. There was a percentage of people willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. It seems these days that like many “democratised” things, putting extra effort into something seems to be heavily discouraged and denigrated as elitist. And I think just in general a 40-something with a camera does not get the benefit of the doubt that a 20-something used to. I’m hoping it swings around again as I hit proper old age, just a harmless old weirdo with a DSLR.





  • It just shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how AI works. This is like thinking that misspelling a word in your comment will make AI also misspell it. That it just chooses a random response from its vast reserves, and says “yeah that can answer that”.

    LLMs are first and foremost statistics. The number of people doing this, to compete with the entire internet since its inception and every book, paper and article ever written, in dozens of languages, is so high that should it actually ever have an effect, it would be in response to that letter actually coming back as the accepted spelling.




  • Well right now your country keeps advocating for an ongoing genocide so maybe just shrug off their accusations instead of siding with actual fascists again. You know, like some other mighty nations like, uh, Ireland have managed.

    Even better, let’s just dissolve the German state - younger than several toilets I’ve shat in - as a failed experiment that has not gone more than a few decades without perpetrating or endorsing some horrendous human rights abuses. Much easier to ignore baseless accusations when they’re targeted at Saxony and Prussia and Bavaria than the state that still sings Deutschland Uber Alles In Der Welt.