Also remember: don’t panic!

PSR J2322−2650 b, to watch the eternal sunset while walking in the diamond rain! Well, not exactly walking, as there is no solid surface on this planet.

More realistically, I’d like to visit Venus, Titan, Europa and Enceladus. Venus and Titan have opposite extreme conditions while maintaining a dense atmosphere and a solid surface, so it might be quite interesting to watch closely and compare. And Europa with Enceladus have a good chance of keeping extraterrestrial life in the depths of their oceans.

And of course, landing on 1I/Oumuamua and 3I/ATLAS would be thrilling!

Looks like a sound advice!

As Free Software movement clearly demonstrates, there is only one reliable and reproducible method of preventing enshittification: ability to fork; ability to do things on your own, however you want, without anyone’s approval. However, Fediverse doesn’t grant its users this ability. One can not simply fork an instance and/or a community with all of its data. Even if your instance admins are pretty cool (admins of my instance are pretty cool, just saying!), you still have to rely on their goodwill all the time. And setting up a personal instance doesn’t seem feasible enough to widespread selfhosting…

Yeah, I think that must be it. So it wasn’t a déjà vu! Thanks for the clarification.

By the way, is there any good place to ask for help if I’d like to request a modding tool for certain niche games? I have almost no idea about reverse engineering, so I’m unlikely to do it myself, even with LLM assist.

«It’s all your fault!» — Sony to Sam Altman, probably

Also, I have a strange déjà vu: wasn’t there a native Bloodborne recompilation a couple years ago? I remember watching a few videos about it. If I recall correctly, there was a strange cape animation, as it’s internally rendered in 30 FPS, or something like that. Or was it an emulator?

While I mostly sit around and watch the sunset, lowering my expectations to nearly zero and abandoning hope and any long-term goals, I also passionately use Free Software, write some unapologetically apophenic theories about VTubers, and slowly translate some good games and VNs into my native language. This is my way of how to stay sane and connect the world!

Good question! I’d say there should be a mod manager on the receiving end. Something like Limo, that has both generic and some game-specific deployers. But that’s only part of what I want: there should also be a middleware to manage differential downloads between it and the origin.

And when I think about it, it becomes clear that all of this has to be backed by P2P of some sort, as there is no such service that could reliably provide even a simple direct link to an arbitrary binary file, let alone allow you to run some odd directory diff protocol. Unless you have your own server, but this is obviously not an option. So it seems like P2P is the only viable option.

So there should be at least 3 components: a mod manager, a directory diff middleware, and a P2P daemon, and they should all work together. And I just realized that the «directory diff middleware» sounds just like OSTree! But it should be able to pull/push from some kind of P2P remotes instead of HTTP ones. Or something like that.

Let me first describe a very specific problem that I’d like to solve.

So, I make mods for some games and VN (to be more specific, it’s unofficial translations). Sometimes I have to update it and release a new version (and sometimes I just release it in an ongoing mode, part by part, when the next chapter is translated). In either case, I have to ask my audience to manually re-download the entire archive and re-apply it on top of the game directory. Although I manage to make patches pretty lightweight, it still feels so wasteful to re-download the whole archive, even if only a few files are changed!

So, I’d like to have something that could help upload these patches, distribute them, and apply them easily. It should be able to calculate the diff between the local copy and the remote origin, download only required files, and then apply them on top of the game directory. Something like Steam Depots, but standalone. And it should be easy to use, so rsync doesn’t count!

Does all of this make sense, or am I making up nonsense?