Same reason that it’s uncommon for any page to have most of the page covered in ink, regardless of whether it’s a book or a sheaf of papers or whatever. Ink costs something, and it’s cheaper to put ink on a little bit of the page than it is to put ink on everything but a little bit of the page. Unless there’s a compelling reason to do otherwise, you take the cheaper route.

Hmm.

For the early titles listed, when the games came out, Linux was pretty irrelevant from a gaming standpoint.

Later, many games that had cross-platform releases used engines that provided cross-platform compatibility. Those games would have been written to the platform, so I’m sure that ports weren’t as easy.

Now, the games are very elderly. The original team will be long gone. I don’t know if there’s anyone working on those at all – unless a game represents some kind of continued revenue stream, there isn’t a lot of reason to keep engineers on a game.

WINE runs them fine, so there’s a limited return for Blizzard to do a native port. In fact, as I recall, Starcraft was one of the first notable games that WINE ran…I remember Starcraft support being a big deal around 2001, IIRC. The original Warcraft was for DOS, so you can run that in a DOS emulator.

I doubt that the investment in a Linux-native port in 2025 is going to get much of a return relative to what other things one could do with the same resources.

I guess maybe I could see an argument for World of Warcraft, as a very successful, long-running MMORPG that still has players and still represents revenue. But I think that I’d be surprised to see native ports of most of their earlier library.

It’s an interesting idea. If their thesis is true, it might cause compression of the income range.

If we wind up in a situation where the EU mandates a form of censorship that the US bans, I assume that the platforms in question would have to separate their EU and US users and sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

just want to browse what is out there.

If you don’t specifically want Facebook Marketplace, there’s stuff like Craigslist and eBay.

EDIT: It looks like if you go directly to the Facebook Marketplace page rather than the main page at Facebook, it’ll let you search and browse Facebook Marketplace (or it let me do so, at any rate):

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/

I did get a popup asking me to log in, but I closed that and was able to do searches.

I was skeptical, but the New York Times agrees.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/world/asia/china-fight-club-ending.html

Now I’m kind of wondering how many anti-authoritarian movies out there have altered Chinese versions.

I kind of assume that this sort of thing is to soak up media bandwidth while the mass federal layoffs are happening.

You could always just do reverse search on the open dataset to see if it’s an exact copy (or over a threshold).

True, but “exact copy” almost certainly isn’t going to be what gets produced – and you can have a derivative work that isn’t an exact copy of the original, just generate something that looks a lot like part of the original. Like, you’d want to have a pretty good chance of finding a derivative work.

And that would mean that anyone who generates a model to would need to provide access their training corpus, which is gonna be huge – the models, which themselves are large, are a tiny fraction the size of the training set – and I’m sure that some people generating models aren’t gonna want to provide all of their training corpus.

https://archive.is/41nPo

I mean…I agree with you that EVs are relatively-poorly-suited compared to ICEs for long distance trips, and if I had both a gasoline-powered and electricity-powered vehicle, I’d use the gasoline-powered one for a long-distance trip… but not everyone is going to own both. It’s hardly reasonable to say “well, people who own EVs just can’t travel long distances”.

A part of Trump’s politicking has been lying to the public. I’m not sure that you want to do that, whatever freedom it might provide as to policy enactment. I think that that’s pretty corrosive to government credibility. Hard to build credibility, easy to damage it, and it’s a useful thing to have.

Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.

Why would it be ridiculous for EV owners to charge cars away from home or work? l’d say that it’s pretty necessary for long-distance trips.

EDIT:

Long distance power transmission is normally done with aluminum lines, rather than copper.

https://www.anixter.com/en_au/resources/literature/wire-wisdom/copper-vs-aluminum-conductors.html

Aluminum has 61 percent of the conductivity of copper, but has only 30 percent of the weight of copper. That means that a bare wire of aluminum weighs half as much as a bare wire of copper that has the same electrical resistance. Aluminum is generally more inexpensive when compared to copper conductors.

Resistance is a function of the material’s conductivity and the cross-sectional area of a cable. If aluminum has 61% the conductivity of copper, then one needs 1÷0.61=1.63 times the cross-sectional area for an aluminum cable to have the same resistance. That’s a radius 1.63^0.5 = 1.28 times the radius of an equivalent copper cable.

So you only need an aluminum cable with a radius 28% larger to achieve the same overall resistance.

In the case of the EV charging cables, flexibility is at a premium, and increasing the radius decreases that. But my guess is that it’s probably within the range of acceptability to use a bulkier aluminum cable, if need be.

EDIT2: I was also going to suggest liquid-cooled cables, which electric arc furnaces use for their power busses. Apparently Tesla already tried using experimental liquid-cooled cables, a decade back:

https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-cooled-supercharger-wire-experiment-in-mountain-view-but-the-tech-lives-on/

Tesla’s Mountain View Supercharger has always been a little different from the rest.  Not only is it located at the world-famous Computer History Museum – where Tesla sometimes holds events, but until recently, it was also running an experiment utilizing propylene-glycol-cooled supercharging cables…

These cables are thinner and more flexible than the standard Supercharger cables which are about as thick as gas station hoses and sometimes more unwieldy, especially in cold weather when they become less flexible.

We’ve gotten word today that Tesla has switched out the experimental cables in Mountain View for the standard thicker cables, thus ending the public experiment.  Officially Tesla told us “We changed the cables to unify service procedures and parts across all current Supercharger sites.”

That would have been liquid-cooled copper, but one could presumably also do liquid-cooled aluminum. That’s another option, if one wants to keep heat under control with higher resistance from a cable. Probably some extra cost for the cooling system, and there’s some extra waste of energy as conversion to heat that way, but I doubt that it’d make EV charging impractical, were that what was required to deal with people stealing copper.

So, I agree with the EFF that we should not introduce some kind of new legal right to prohibit training on something just because it’s copyrighted. There’s nothing that keeps a human from training themselves on content, so neither should an AI be prohibited.

However.

It is possible for a human to make a work that will infringe existing copyright rights, by producing a derivative work. Not every work inspired by something else will meet the legal bar for being derived, but some can. And just as a human can do that, so too can AIs.

I have no problem with, say, an AI being able to emulate a style. But it’s possible for AIs today to produce works that do meet the bar for being derivative works. As things stand, I believe that that’d make the user of the AI liable. And yet, there’s not really a very good way for them to avoid that. That’s a legit point of complaint, I think, because it leads to people making derivative works.

The existing generative AI systems don’t have a very good way of trying to hint to a user of the model whether a work is derivative.

However, I’d think that what we could do is operate something like a federal registry of images. For published, copyrighted works, we already have mandatory deposit with the Library of Congress.

If something akin to Tineye were funded by the government, it would be possible to maintain an archive of registered, copyrighted work. It would then be practical for someone who had just generated an image to check whether there was a pre-existing image.

I don’t know whether Tineye works like this, but for it to work, we’d probably have to have a way to recognize an image under a bunch of transformations: scale, rotation, color, etc. I don’t know what Tineye does today, but I’d assume some kind of feature recognition – maybe does line-detection, vectorizes it, breaks an image up into a bunch of chuns, performs some operation to canonicalize the rotation based on the content of the chunk, and then performs some kind of fuzzy hash on the lines.

Then one could place an expectation that if one is to distribute an LLM-generated work, it be fed into such a system, and if not so verified and distributed and the work is derivative of a registered work, the presumption being that the infringement was intentional (which IIRC entitles a rights holder to treble damages under US law). We don’t have a mathematical model today to determine whether one work is “derivative” of another, but we could make one or at least give an approximation and warning.

I think that that’s practical for most cases for for holders of copyrighted images and LLM users. It permits people to use LLMs to generate images for non-distributed use. It doesn’t create a legal minefield for an LLM user. It places no restrictions on model creators. It’s doable using something like existing technology. It permits a viewer of a generated image to verify that the image is not derivative.

Which is not renaming. That’s not what that word means.

Sure it is. It’s altering the name that the federal government uses – that’s a rename. It’s not renaming it from Mexico’s standpoint. There is absolutely nothing about “rename” that requires it specify what some other entity uses. Trump can rename the thing from the US government’s standpoint, and the Mexican government can rename it from their standpoint.

Google, a private organization is legally required to call it the Gulf of America because they’re a defense contractor.

Ah, fair enough, that might be true…though I suspect that that’s not true of what it does outside of government contracting. Not generally true of private stuff, though.

EDIT: No, I’m pretty sure that you’re incorrect. I can’t find reference to any ties to their contracting status, and Google’s saying that it’s their choice here:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/01/28/google-maps-will-show-gulf-of-america-and-mt-mckinley-to-us-users/

The company said it has a “longstanding practice” of applying name changes when they have been “updated in official government sources” and for the U.S. that would be the names displayed by the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).

Trump cannot rename the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not land that the US owns. It’s international waters.

A country can specify use of an official name internally. They cannot compel outside countries to use it. But a leader could tell the government that he runs to use it. If it has laws – which the US does not – which can compel people internally to use that, a country could do that. Even in the US, private organizations are not legally-required to call it “Gulf of America”.

It’s also not all that unusual for names to differ across countries.

We call Germany “Germany” in the US, rather than “Deutschland”, even though Germany isn’t within US borders.

It’s unusual for leadership to require their government to do so, though I’m sure that there are prior examples, probably over territorial disputes. In this case, it’s pretty lame – I mean, this isn’t even popular with the American public as a whole, just part of the political theater stuff. It’s probably kind of antagonizing to Mexico. But Mexico doesn’t have the ability to specify what the US government calls it – Trump does.

Am I going to use “Gulf of America”? No. I’m going to keep using “Gulf of Mexico”, and I expect that it’ll be changed back once Trump is out of office (though the whole Denali/Mount McKinley thing might stick).

I don’t understand why USDOT approval is required to impose tolls in the first place. If it were the interstate, sure, but it looks like this is just downtown Manhattan.

kagis

Ah, okay, I think that this is probably it. Apparently tolls require federal approval if there’s federal funding involved.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/tolling_and_pricing/tolling_pricing/section_129_faqs.aspx

May tolling be allowed under 23 U.S.C. 129 if the activity that authorizes tolling is funded without Federal assistance?

Yes. A State may elect to fund a project qualified to be tolled under 23 U.S.C. 129 with or without Federal-aid assistance, and the absence of Federal-aid does not restrict the State’s eligibility to use 129(a) authorities to toll a Federal-aid highway or bridge owned by the State.

And it sounds from the article like the project is getting federal funding:

Observers had speculated that he would try to withdraw federal approval for the plan or threaten to withhold federal funding.

You can get these folding keyboards that will fit in a pocket, often have a roughly-cell-phone-sized case.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=folding+keyboard

Still another item to carry, but it might fit the niche you’re looking for better if you’re not happy with hauling a regular 60% keyboard. Larger than those Blackberry-style thumbboards.

The Trump admin cant pass any laws. Its why they are trying to go all in on executive power, even when its illegal. They lack legislative power due to a fractured congress, even in their own party.

Regarding the mass layoffs? I don’t think that that’s actually the primary reason, though the House is a pretty narrow Republican majority. I think that it’s more that one aspect or another of the layoffs are potentially unpopular. Congressional representatives may need to be around for a while, and I would guess that even for Republican legislators who have constituencies that overall support layoffs, they’d rather not be directly involved, because some people are going to be upset, and some people are going to find that a government service that they liked isn’t there any more. Trump is out in a bit under four years, and Elon’s not elected or going to be in government and IIRC – though his role is certainly fuzzy – at least for a while was under some classification that was supposed to be for people who are only expected to be present for 180 days or less, so he may not be around for too long. A senator or representative may hope to be around Congress for a long time. Easier to just let the President act and then not take any action to stop what he’s doing.

Same sort of reason that Congress hasn’t declared war in ages, just done variations on “authorizing the President to make use of military force”. Declaring war is potentially-politically-costly if a war becomes unpopular. Politically-safer for Congressional representatives to authorize the President to act and then letting him mostly be exposed to any political risks.

I wish he would’ve negotiated an end to this while Ukraine still had some leverage.

Ukraine doesn’t want to give up land, and isn’t willing to tolerate not having security guarantees. Russia is convinced that it can ultimately militarily prevail.

Wars end when one side is either unable to continue or the two sides moderate their demands to some kind of meeting point. What’s the Biden administration going to do?

The US isn’t willing to go to war on the matter, so compelling Russia militarily probably isn’t an option. The US could have withdrawn military support for Ukraine, but I don’t think that that’s what you want. There’s more sanctions, but we’ve already got a lot of sanctions in place, and you want a rapid resolution.

Maybe we could have dramatically ramped up aid for Ukraine, as long as Ukraine could have made use of it. The US is probably willing to do that to some degree, as long as it doesn’t compromise its position relative to China. But will that substantively change the situation? Like, if you’re Putin, you’ve probably got a pretty good incentive to try to stick it out, if you feel that Biden and Trump are going to have much of a difference in position.

I mean, there are sources there. It’s just…not people who would have current, inside information. John Bolton hasn’t been in government since he was National Security Advisor under Trump in Trump’s first term and the two fell out. He’s been asserting that Trump doesn’t like NATO or alliances at all for some time, though, based on his interactions with Trump in Term 1.

kagis

Here’s him in 2022, back before he expected Trump to actually make it into a second term:

https://www.businessinsider.com/bolton-putin-waiting-for-trump-to-withdraw-from-nato-in-2nd-term-2022-3

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton says ‘Putin was waiting’ for Trump to withdraw the United States from NATO in his second term

“I thought he put his foot over it, but at least he didn’t withdraw then,” said Bolton, who wrote in his memoir about Trump’s consideration of withdrawing from NATO in 2018. “In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO. And I think Putin was waiting for that.”

Trump viewed NATO as a liability during his presidency, believing that European countries were not paying enough of their fair share of the burden of providing defense to the alliance. Bolton, a State Department official during the George W. Bush administration, was brought on to be Trump’s national security advisor in 2018 only to be ousted a year and a half later.

Bolton’s latest comments come just days after he told Newsmax that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was,” pushing back on a host who said the former president had been “tough on Russia.”

Asked whether he was satisfied by how the Trump administration handled Ukraine, Bolton criticized his former boss.

“I think it went very badly,” said Bolton. "It was hard to have discussions on geostrategic issues when the president’s main interest was getting… Rudy Giuliani in to see [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky so they could go find Hillary Clinton’s computer server.

Bolton said on Friday that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper were concerned by Trump’s behavior at the time. “All of us felt that we needed to bolster Ukraine’s security, and were appalled at what Trump was doing,” he said.

EDIT: It’d actually be interesting to see whether Trump can withdraw from NATO. Remarkably-enough, this is a part of American constitutional law that has never been legally-resolved: does the President, acting solo, have the ability to terminate a ratified treaty without action from Congress?

The question was raised with SCOTUS in Goldwater v. Carter, but that case was dismissed on a technicality, so we don’t really have a ruling on the matter.

Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Senator Barry Goldwater and other members of the United States Congress challenging the right of President Jimmy Carter to unilaterally nullify the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which the United States had signed with the Republic of China, so that relations could instead be established with the People’s Republic of China.

Goldwater and his co-filers claimed that the President required Senate approval to take such an action, under Article II, Section II of the U.S. Constitution, and that, by not doing so, President Carter had acted beyond the powers of his office. While dismissing the case the Court left open the question of the constitutionality of President Carter’s actions.

To enter into a treaty, like NATO, the Senate’s approval is required. So it does seem reasonable to me that going to the Senate should be required to exit a treaty. But…we haven’t actually established what the rule there is, even after nearly two-and-a-half centuries of being a country.

EDIT2: The UK recently had to fight out a similar question over Brexit in their Supreme Court: could the Prime Minister, without action from Parliament, withdraw from the European Union?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_Secretary_of_State_for_Exiting_the_European_Union

In that case, their Supreme Court ruled no, that the Prime Minister couldn’t singlehandedly leave the European Union, had to go back to Parliament.

EDIT3: I’d also add that I am dubious that Trump would leave NATO, even if Europe refuses to spend another cent on defense. I do think that he would potentially retaliate in other ways. I think that most policymakers in the US want the US in NATO – but that there is a lot of agreement on Europe and defense spending and that the US has been ignored for a long time on the matter.

EDIT4: In the hypothetical that the US did leave NATO, it could theoretically rejoin under a more-sympathetic administration, but there would be two obstacles.

• The US Senate. The US has a very high bar for entering into treaties compared to most countries – a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate, plus the President. There is a reason that the US is not party to some important treaties that many other countries are party to (no ratification approval from the Senate) but still is a signatory to the treaty and acts as if it is a member, like UNCLOS. So it’d require a supermajority in the Senate to rejoin. And for NATO, “pretending to be in” doesn’t really have the same effect – under UNSC rules, war is legal, whether or not the UNSC is onboard, as long as it’s defensive and the justification is actual membership in a collective security arrangement. That is, normally a country isn’t supposed to go to war without UNSC approval (on which Russia has a veto which it would probably use) unless it is in defense of itself or an allied member who has been attacked. While the US probably has the practical ability to go to war without UNSC approval if it really, really wants to – who would stop it? – and has certainly come up with rather tortured legal justifications in the past when it couldn’t get explicit UNSC sign-off (e.g. the Iraq War), it does establish political and legal barriers. In the past, the US has not shown a lot of willingness to enter into major direct conflict in Europe without a treaty commitment – like, say, Ukraine or Finland in the Winter War. That being said, the US did enter the Korean War without a treaty commitment, so…shrugs.

• Other NATO members. This requires unanimity among all NATO members. If you remember how difficult it was to get NATO approval for Finland and Sweden, the bar is the same for the US…but the impact of the US being in or out is a whole lot more consequential than Finland or Sweden being in or out. I mean, if I were the Kremlin and decided upon a confrontation path, I would pull pretty much any lever available to me to ensure that at least one member did not approve the US re-entering.