How to fund FOSS software development: 1. Write a really good FOSS program 2. Make the license MIT, but also provide an AGPL licence 3. Specify that to the AGPL license applies when the code is provided (via source or object) via an LLM. 4. Specify that the LLM company has to pay royalties.

End-game for this Netflix buyout of WBD should be that Netflix takes on the Warner Brothers brand as their identity, and focus Netflix as the company that sells the streaming platform. Netflix doing shows has always felt off.

Facebook renamed itself Meta in 2021. Since then, VRChat's DAU has gone up 230% on Steam alone, which is its smallest userbase - peak users has gone from 25k to 63k. Without any new hardware support (from Valve). The reason Facebook's metaverse project has failed is because Horizon Worlds is shit.

Aware it's not the prevailing view but my read on the LLM bubble is that it's going to last several more years and result in utilities (i.e. cloud service providers) being bailed out at immense cost, once one of the effects of the opportunity costs cause someone like Amazon to issue profit warnings.

Removal of jury trials for minor things seems to me to have two obvious upsides - less people being bothered by jury duty during their lives and alignment with Scotland - and only really one obvious downside, in that it does mean that on average juries will be engaging with more horrible cases.

Someone should ask the OBR to audit the comparative cost of it using a bespoke WP server as a CDN vs just using gov.uk like any sensible government department Should create a quango called the Office Of Backend Responsibility to solve this sort of thing.

I've mentally priced in that Labour are being routed in 2029 already - they're now in the situation the coalition Lib Dems were in, caused by largely the same sorts of mistakes and with the same sorts of inevitable outcomes. Just wish I had any chance of emigrating before 2029.

After one month: I like Qobuz! Feels really algorithm-free so I'm not just getting endless auto-generated playlists, and they seem to make an effort to make it easy to find an album to listen to - and then buy if you want off their web store too. Really like how focussed the app's front page is.

Good news for once, Unity's keynote at their developer conference was entirely free of LLM features and confirmed that the big engine move that should massively reduce CPU overhead has a preview coming soon. Once the technical preview is out I'm excited to get started on Unity C# dev again :D

I have just chipped in €25. Incredibly fun, well-made software, and you can use it to win an Oscar or make the next big video game.

Best read on the state of things is the government staggers onward to 2029, but I am not sure what happens if Labour manage to lose to the left in London and to the right in the shires. But the last time we had a properly apocalyptic meldown of the governing party was 1931.

The only US chain I've ever encountered that got the "oh god, no, we are not going there" treatment when I was staying with a friend's family in Orlando was Red Lobster. I always wanted to go. An outright bad US restaurant chain must be _bad_.

It's incredible that leaving the ECHR is even being pretended to be policy by anyone, let alone leaving Labour in a situation where they're committing to refugee policy that is incompatible with it. You can't leave the ECHR if you're the UK without withdrawing from the Good Friday Agreement.

Broke: I live in Tottenham, it's kinda hard to campaign around here Woke: ah but it's still worth doing the campaigning so people have a fair option Bespoke: the fury of ten thousand suns cannot restrain my contempt for this Labour government, every single vote torn from their grasp is a victory

???????????????????????????????? Hello? Hello yes I'm convinced, this is a simulation, I would like to go open that door in the sky like in the Truman Show now, yes

A Westminster spad is talking to a German friend at the pub. Spad: "Well, at this rate Labour will be so completely unpopular the only path to power will be like your SDP - a coalition with the Greens and liberals." German: "Jamaica?" Spad: "No, they did it to themselves."

This summarizes how stupid this refugee policy pitch is. "I know British people do not want to close the doors" <- So who is this policy for? Aquaman? "But" <- Why are you doing something you acknowledge your own now-increasingly-theoretical voter bloc hates?

The UK has a smaller shadow economy than France, despite the latter having compulsory ID www.worldeconomics.com/Informal-Eco...

One would point out that any Ukrainian here because their country is currently being invaded is an "irregular migrant". Wonder if government-by-headline has factored in the cost of creating a rigid and unkind refugee system when the next European war happens.

It's mad how you can summarize the steps to take for a moderate UK government atm as "do exactly what the opposite of your opponents in the press are calling for". It's almost as if the government was elected to do the opposite of what their opponents in the press called for.

I think this sums up my overall thoughts reading about this idiotic anti-refugee policy from the LD Home Secretary: there is no prize to being the second-preference vote in a FPTP election.

A prediction for 2029: Labour lose more deposits than any time in modern history.

Trying to understand the logic of shipping a VR headset that is intended to stream PC VR games, when your platform has exactly two VR games in its top 100 (VRC and No Man's Sky, technically), and not catering at all to the VRChat audience, and not providing any new VR games alongside the launch.

Steam Machine - incredibly bad buy as a below-TV games machine when competing against a Deck or similar (Remember that Playstation Vita TV thing, and how the Switch/2 are overwhelmingly used in handheld mode?) and whilst you can just get a PS5, Mac Mini, etc. Awesome single-purchase work PC.

Incredible how I can go from real hype to "whelp, that kills competent VR dead" in ten minutes, but them's the breaks. Going from lighthouses to SLAM is performance regression, not progress. Not sure the point of the Frame at all if it's ultimately a Quest clone.

Valve is now shipping a headset that has worse audio, worse controller ergonomics and worse tracking than their 2019 headset, whilst killing both the Beyond and both Tundra and HTC trackers, as I'm unaware of anyone other than Valve manufacturing Base Station 2.0s.

i am now, unfortunately, dead.

Not sure if I buy the pitch that the Frame gets announced tomorrow and then Half-Life 3 next week, but HL3 _isn't_ a VR game, or maybe HL3 has a VR SKU with different content or something. If you announce the Frame, and then announce a huge game which doesn't need the Frame...

The problem with the BBC is that impartiality can mean a requirement to report without fear or favour, a requirement to make all sides heard, and a requirement to be a viewed as a "neutral" (or evenly-disliked) source by all wings, and those are not all achievable without screwing up all the time.

The future of games development is Wagyu beef. Developers need to specialize on quality they can sell for a premium. AAA development has to be left to projects backed by nation-state investment funds/Chinese publishers/etc. Win on quality and hope there is an audience.

The conclusion from me having an existential crisis about games development is that you either crunch to ship someone else's project or you crunch to ship your own, and if you do the former, that product has to compete with products made in far more competitive countries like China.

At this point, weighing up everything, I am genuinely not sure what the future of western games is, especially on console. Looking at job adverts, I'm not seeing a healthy range of roles being offered at all. Then again maybe there is just an easier answer: recession, stagflation, etc.

God, looking at LinkedIn jobs atm and it is just a mess. If you told me London's IT industry only did sports betting and casino apps I'd believe you.

Union-busting action at R* is a further black mark on an already-crippled British games industry. And if it can happen at R* it can happen at any studio. Games industry staff should be unionized, and the response to attacks on workers should be the capacity to strike.

A total and utter hero

SAG-AFTRA stands in solidarity with the IWGB Game Workers Union exercising their right to organize following reports of union-busting at Rockstar. Our members’ union performances on Rockstar games are an integral part of the success and legacy of games like Grand Theft Auto.

If the cinema is deserted: yes, quietly, make sure you don't piss someone off If the cinema is even 10% full - no, but if you honestly laugh or are in tears, that's OK, feelings are valid If it's packed: the audience is literally half the fun, try and vibe it out Peak cinema is when everyone cheers

Canva (who own the software formerly called PagePlus) have now rolled out a unified app that covers photo, vector and design editing in one. Free, supported by a subscription tool that hawks the usual cloud services. Massive unlock for local parties, esp. the LDs. www.affinity.studio/download

The difference between a good politician and a great one is that the good politician picks a platform that wins them an election, and the great one wins on the platform they actually believe in.

The real reason I gave up on politics (other than it being a horrendous career for the neurodivergent) is that when I spend an hour getting home on a bus on the A1010 and watching as we linger, stuck behind a row of empty Audis, I end up considering violent revolution.

AWS casually firing its entire games division. Would assume Twitch is gunned down at some point too.

Please play The Séance of Blake Manor. store.steampowered.com/app/1395520/... It's spooky and set at Halloween, Irish, and the protagonist has a nose that looks like he walked into a wall as a baby and never structurally recovered It's also absolutely ace

The UK games industry in one skeet:

It's increasingly clear there is something very badly wrong in the UK games industry; an industry that once was a world-leader and now appears to be incapable of shipping any sort of quality in studios larger than ten people.

Whiplash from "a columnist I've followed for years said a nice thing about my skeet" to "oh god my mentions" Uhhhh read this guy's newsletter and pick up the FT sometimes, it's like a normal newspaper but all the celebrity gossip is about company mergers

This handy map demonstrates how Labour loses the next election and to who, in what seat, based on Labour deciding that they'll be saved by tactical voting. (It also demonstrates why the Greens have decided to Camden-ize)

Anyone on Labour's right thinking "tactical voting will keep Reform out" and "this means we can hold seats due to tactical voting!" need to consider unhooking themselves off the hopium gas line. The LDs had the same mantra about localism and their reward was 8 seats in 2015.

You CAN do end-to-end video game development on Ubuntu at the moment, but if you're not taking a use-Blender-for-literally-everything approach, God help you

Was asked my take on best Linux distro for VRChatters at the weekend, and the answer is Ubuntu 24.04, as that is the one Unity officially states their Editor supports. The actual answer is Bazzite atm