When I get bored with the conversation/tired of arguing I will simply tersely agree with you and then stop responding. I’m too old for this stuff.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • And Elon Musk was “legally in the clear” to sue a trade group into non-existence over the idea that companies deciding to boycott his site independently was collusion.

    I am objecting loudly and powerfully to “legally in the clear” being equated with “acceptable” or “within the spirit of the law.”

    Make no mistake. As far as we know, this is only legally in the clear because the developers are unable to fight it. That does NOT make Nintendo’s action correct. By LAW the developers are in the right, they simply cannot afford to defend themselves. If your claim is that it is technically legal to threaten to sue anybody you want, you are correct and also terrifyingly shortsighted. Inability of someone to defend their rights for financial reasons is a miscarriage of justice. Given the options of smugly pointing out the technical situation or ranting about the injustice, I’ll take the latter.

    Let’s put it another way… You’re absolutely right. Nintendo is LEGALLY in the right to bully someone into submission using the threat of a lawsuit they cannot afford with overwhelming money. The legal system can’t touch them.

    But that means the ONLY place where Nintendo will EVER face ANY kind of consequences is in the court of public opinion, so why on EARTH would your take on the situation be, “Oh well… nothing we can do.” It’s not much, but it’s the ONLY lever you have, and to relinquish it is fatalistic, shortsighted, and overall inconceivable as a strategy.



  • Perhaps. But I see a lot of hand rubbing and “oh welling” from people when this is a legitimate moment for anger at the precedence this sets. I understand the urge to make it make sense, but the fact is people either tacitly accepting this activity as reasonable or arguing about the red herring of whether the source code is still available to sit and rot with nobody touching it but shady scam artists, not only moves the bar on what what Nintendo and other companies see they can get away with, it has a chilling effect on future preservation efforts among the constantly shrinking pool of people skilled enough in low level development to do this kind of work.

    I guess my point is, I’m seeing very few voices that are sufficiently concerned or angry enough about this event considering the far reaching consequences it’s going to have.

    We shouldn’t in ANY way be normalizing this activity, and our reaction shouldn’t be “Of COURSE they did this.” Although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after we just watched Boeing murder a half dozen of its whistleblowers and the most people did was make a few memes. We’re living in a literal dystopia, apparently.


  • You’re incorrect. Creating an emulator is not illegal. Nintendo has the legal right to threaten to sue someone, but if you are threatening to sue for something that is not a crime, and you know that, and you do it anyway in the hopes of bankrupting them before the case settles, that’s not a legal proceeding, it’s extortion. I can threaten to sue you for cooking pancakes in your house, and while it’s technically ALLOWED for me to do that, it’s clearly and obviously not a case I would win, but if the threat of making your life hell is prominent enough, you might get forced into backing down, which is exactly what’s happening here.

    They would absolutely NOT lose in court for creating an emulator. I cannot stress enough exactly how legal emulation is. It’s as legal as making your pancakes. The only way they would lose in court is if there is some EXTRA thing they’ve done that we don’t know about. If all they’ve done is create and distribute Ryujinx, there is absolutely NO way Nintendo would win a case in the US. This is settled law, and saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so, although it DOES embolden companies to bullshit developers with more bogus threats in the future.


  • They aren’t working within any rights. Emulator production is a legal right that Nintendo has neither the ability to bestow nor deny. It’s the founding legal rationale behind virtualization as a technology. This is the equivalent of someone holding a gun to your head and telling you to shut up - the forced relinquishing of your rights through threat of force, and it’s a little frightening to watch people suggest otherwise. This has played out in court and is settled law. Bleem! went BANKRUPT to secure a legal victory against SONY and establish that emulators are completely legal and there is no “gray area” about them, and you should be in less of a hurry to throw legal rights away because “Well, Nintendo said so…”



  • No, the OSI model is fine.

    I’m talking more about sandboxing an interpreted app that runs a container that runs another sandboxed interpreted app, both running their own instances of their interpreter with their own dependencies and accessible through a web interface that is accessible through yet another container running a web server that is running in Python with a virtual environment despite being the only Python app on the container, which is then connected to from another sandboxed tab on a sandboxed browser on your machine.

    But hey, at least it isn’t, god forbid, a MONOLITH. That would require someone to take the time to understand how the application works.


  • Their UX and UI are their bread and butter, but as someone who has done extensive web app development for use on Safari browsers, if I had a nickel for every time their browser just IGNORED a standard, broke one that previously worked, or added new “features” that broke a standard, passing the responsibility of building a workaround down to individual developers… I’d have a few dollars anyway. I don’t have much faith their code is all that good compared to average under the hood and the UI, and I think their reputation unjustly leads users to turn a blind eye or give them a pass when their stuff DOESN’T work or works BADLY. “They’re Apple… everyone else seems happy. I must be doing something wrong.”