I’ve never played either the original or the remastered version of Oblivion. I got into Bethesda games via the Fallout series rather than the Elder Scrolls series.

I think I did see a friend, who was a big fan of Daggerfall, play that. And I went back and played Morrowind with the open-source GemRB engine. But I never did Oblivion.

EDIT: Sorry, via the open-source OpenMW engine. GemRB was for the Infinity Engine, and I also did those games.

EDIT2: I’ve also never played Elder Scrolls Online, as I wasn’t really interested in an online experience. I did play Fallout 76, which is online, but that was only because Fallout 5 wasn’t coming out any time soon, and the most that was going to be available for a long time was Fallout 76.

This shit should really be illegal.

I suspect that if you mandated human support for unpaid services that the Threadiverse wouldn’t exist.

Scrap metal was commonly used as a raw material by PMT, according to the Indonesian outlet Antara News. It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal

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

The Goiânia accident [ɡoˈjɐ̃njə] was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, after an unsecured radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 of them were found to have been contaminated.[1][2]

The radiation source in the Goiânia accident was a small capsule containing about 93 grams (3.3 oz) of highly radioactive caesium chloride (a caesium salt) made with the radioactive isotope caesium-137, and encased in a shielding canister made of lead and steel.

On September 13, 1987, the guard tasked with protecting the site did not show up for work. Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira illegally entered the partially demolished IGR site.[7] They partially disassembled the teletherapy unit and placed the source assembly in a wheelbarrow to later take to Roberto’s home. They thought they might get some scrap value for the unit.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident

A radioactive contamination incident occurred in 1984 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, originating from a radiation therapy unit purchased by a private medical company and subsequently dismantled for lack of personnel to operate it. The radioactive material, cobalt-60, ended up in a junkyard, where it was sold to foundries that inadvertently melted it with other metals and produced about 6,000 tons of contaminated rebar.[1] These were distributed in 17 Mexican states and several cities in the United States. It is estimated that 4,000 people were exposed to radiation as a result of this incident.[1]

Detection of radioactive material

On January 16, 1984, a radiation detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. state of New Mexico detected the presence of radioactivity in the vicinity. The detector went on because a truck carrying rebar produced by Achisa had taken an accidental detour and passed through the entrance and exit gate of the laboratory’s LAMPF technical area.

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

A radiation accident occurred in Samut Prakan Province, Thailand in January–February 2000. The accident happened when an insecurely stored unlicensed cobalt-60 radiation source was recovered by scrap metal collectors who, together with a scrapyard worker, subsequently dismantled the container, unknowingly exposing themselves and others nearby to ionizing radiation. Over the following weeks, those exposed developed symptoms of radiation sickness and eventually sought medical attention. The Office of Atomic Energy for Peace (OAEP), Thailand’s nuclear regulatory agency, was notified when doctors came to suspect radiation injury, some 17 days after the initial exposure. The OAEP sent an emergency response team to locate and contain the radiation source, which was estimated to have an activity of 15.7 terabecquerels (420 Ci), and was eventually traced to its owner. Investigations found failure to ensure secure storage of the radiation source to be the root cause of the accident, which resulted in ten people being hospitalized for radiation injury, three of whom died, as well as the potentially significant exposure of 1,872 people.[1]

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

The theft of radioactive material in Tammiku, often called the Tammiku nuclear accident, took place in 1994. Three brothers in Tammiku, Männiku, Saku Parish (Harju County), Estonia, who were scrap metal scavengers, entered a fenced area in the woods and broke into a small shed that was seemingly abandoned (after having had no success with entering a larger building inside the area), with stairs leading to an underground hall. The brothers did not know that the buildings were nuclear waste storage facilities (although there were signs at the gate, they did not see them because they had climbed over the fence elsewhere). One of the brothers, Ivan, suffered a crush injury when a drum fell onto him. The brothers placed some pieces of metal into their pockets and went home, planning to return later. Ivan placed a metal cylinder in his pocket, not knowing that it was a strong caesium-137 radioactive source that was released from a container broken by the falling drum.[1] He received a 4,000 rad whole-body dose and died 12 days later.[2] Only after Ivan’s family’s dog died, and Ivan’s stepson showed radiation burn of his hands (as a result of briefly touching the cylinder), was the cause of Ivan’s death identified. The delay in information was due to the brothers’ reluctance to admitting to the break-in.[3]

While we’ve often — not always — managed to label radiation sources, in general, people scrapping metal stuff, often stealing it, haven’t done the best job of understanding or following related rules.

The pharmaceutical variant has a strictly controlled presence of DEG, if any, unlike the cheaper commercial kind, which has far higher levels of the compound, making it unfit for human consumption. Manufacturers, knowingly or unknowingly, use commercial-grade PG when making cough syrups to cut costs.

Known as the “pharmacy of the world”, India accounted for 3 per cent of the world’s total pharmaceutical exports in 2023. It is particularly known for exporting affordable drugs, especially to Africa and other developing regions.

In May 2023, following the scandals abroad, the CDSCO mandated a testing protocol for cough syrups in designated Indian laboratories before export.

But no such testing was mandated for the domestic market, which has many small manufacturers producing low-cost medicines. It has now asked all state governments to submit a list of cough syrup manufacturers, while initiating a joint audit of these companies.

The failure to prevent repeated cough syrup scandals has also brought up a whiff of alleged corruption. Mr Sukesh Khajuria, a public health activist who has been helping families of the 2019-20 victims in and around Jammu seek justice, alleged that the Indian government had failed to rein in corruption within the country’s drug regulatory set-up.

“Pharma companies have hidden partnerships with the party in power,” he claimed.

A 2024 report published on Scroll, an Indian online news website, said that 35 pharmaceutical companies in India had contributed nearly 10 billion rupees (S$146.4 million) to political parties. Of these, at least seven companies were being investigated for poor-quality drugs when they made their contributions.

Well. If the state doesn’t fix it from a licensing side, I guess it’d be possible for a company to fill the gap. Like, certify drug manufacturers.

The difference between certification and licensing is that a certifier can’t prohibit a company from doing business if it isn’t certified. But…it does mean that a purchaser, at least as long as they know what certification to look for, can look for a given certification.

You can make a certification company that places any restrictions it wants to certify a product or company, so that eliminates roadblocks to getting that side of things moving. 'course, the certifier has to build reputation for the certification to mean much.

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

I think that this is “video” as in “moving images”. Photoshop isn’t a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it’d be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up — not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise — to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

I don’t think that this is the “end of truth”. There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we’d have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

I can imagine an Internet-connected camera — as on a cell phone — that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn’t stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

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

I don’t see any official announcement of cancellation, but honestly, between its development not going well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil_2

The game was originally announced at Ubidays 2008, with almost a decade of silence before being re-revealed at Ubisoft’s E3 2017 conference, although no release window or target platforms have been mentioned.

Its development was characterized in the media by uncertainty, doubt, and rumors about the game’s future, and has been referred to as vaporware by industry figures such as Jason Schreier due to its lengthy development and lack of a release date.[1] In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development period of a AAA video game, at more than 15 years. In 2023, the creative director, Emile Morel, died suddenly at age 40.

And Ubisoft as a whole having problems recently:

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

…my bet would be against it coming out. Or, even if it does…I mean, people who wanted the game want it because the original Beyond Good and Evil was a solid game. That first game came out in 2003, 22 years back. That’s a long gap in time, technology, and people. Someone could probably sit down and try to come up with a list of examples where you had one very successful game in a series and another that far down the road, and my guess is that in most cases, the next game doesn’t live up to the original.

tries to think of an example where someone’s managed something like this

I like Carrier Command 2. That came out 33 years after Carrier Command, though it certainly didn’t meet with the same level of relative success, and there was an (unsuccessful) remake of the original between the two releases.

Starfield was very stable for me.

Fallout: New Vegas was unstable, especially near the end of a run. And I’d swear that it was worse on the XBox than on the PC. Not just longer load times, but plenty of times that the thing would die when loading an area.

My impression from playing both was that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were pretty solid when you started playing a game — well, okay, if you get the post-release patches in place — but that the game became less-stable over the course of a run.

The loading times also got a lot more painful over the course of a run. Fallout 76 and Starfield did much better in that respect.

As much as I hate the idea of remastering all their games instead of just making another fucking game,

I would pretty happily buy the 3D Fallout games remastered for the Starfield engine. Higher texture resolution. Use some of the features that were added to their engine in the years subsequent to release. Capable of being rendered at frame rates that modern monitors can display. Eliminate some of the weird ragdoll stuff they used to have. Modders have improved the models a lot, and I’m sure that that’s doable. Another popular change for Skyrim modders was doing things like opening up the world (because you didn’t need to load towns separately from the outside world on modern computers), adding more foliage and other things that computers couldn’t handle back at release, adding modern shader effects, and all that.

I mean, sure, I’d also like to have Fallout 5, but I suspect that the cost of doing a remaster is a lot less than a new game, and the earlier games are getting old enough that they’re kinda hard to recommend. I mean, if they release Fallout 5 in the early 2030s, the last game in the mainline series will be Fallout 4, 2015, and before that, Fallout: New Vegas from 2010 and Fallout 3 from 2008. That’ll be a huge gap, if you hope to get players to play the series. If you rewind a comparable 15 years from Fallout 3, you’re at 1993. That’s the original Doom release. That’s a pretty enormous gap.

Skyrim got the LE->SE (well, and AE) path, so it got updated to be more-playable over the years. The Fallout games are still running on the old stuff.

The apps don’t do anything useful if the government blocks connectivity to the servers that the software needs to talk to at the national network infrastructure level.

That depends on how you define the web

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]

gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)

This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!

I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on the Threadiverse. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.

How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?

Gopher predated the Web.

I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with <em></em>, <a href=""></a>, and <h1></h1> anymore, for example.

You can use VoIP if you have a cell data connection.

There are some existing video games that incorporate LLMs or diffusion models. So in one sense, that’s probably very doable.

But I think that it’s probably going to be a slow process. There are probably going to be dead ends. I kind of suspect that early games, even if they’re technically-novel, probably will suffer the same problems that past video games did before they matured. End of the day, a video game needs to be fun, and just throwing a new technology like a powerful graphics card or a fancy natural-language parser or whatever at it doesn’t get you to that fun game. I think that it’s going to take quite some years of game developers iterating to incorporate generative AI stuff well.

That being said, there are some things I’d like to see tried.

• My guess is that it’s probably possible to create to develop some sort of social-media-based video game that generates a choose-your-own-adventure style video game, remembering story branches generated by other users to take advantage of human-assisted creation, and trying to show “top” story forks. Like, make the bar low, use voting or link tracking or something to determine what story branches people like, and show those.

• I’d like to see some kind of system for tracking world state that isn’t purely based on having an LLM look at the entire preceding text for context. That’s a pretty inefficient way to store world state, and implementing game logic at the LLM level is, I think, going to be problematic. Think of something like, oh, a game system like Inform/TADS/glulx-based interactive fiction. You have objects and properties and a game engine that handles tracking them and their interactions. But you try to get an LLM to generate text for those objects.

• There are some games that use diffusion models, either statically or at runtime, to generate illustrations, where the number of permutations would be impractical for a human artist. The ones I’ve seen have been adult-oriented; I don’t know how the field has developed, and there may well be a lot more out there now.

• One thing that I think could be done today is to start using procedurally-generated voices. Generative AI can do pretty decent voice synthesis. Video games are good at doing procedurally-generated text, but if you do that, you don’t get voice audio. That’s not really a game genre, but it’s a way in which one could provide some neat added functionality. I think that to really take advantage of this, there’d need to be a training corpus of text annotated with emotional information and such, but I’ve seen people doing this in a usable form for game mods.

I don’t think that that’d be very analogous. He explicitly said that he wasn’t going to do the Hyperloop himself, just proposed it as an idea that someone else could implement.

That being said, you could dig up something that Musk had said that he would do that he didn’t. considers FSD on Tesla vehicles is probably the prime example.

I would guess that it’s probably not much by way of change — theoretically, maybe just a single line patch — to cause this check not to take place.

That’s actually a really interesting question.

I understand that Apple takes issue with packages that can themselves “take packages”. But historically, I don’t believe that Google has. Of course, Google also hasn’t done the registration thing historically, either.

I don’t see why it would need to be affected.

The constraint to require a valid signing isn’t something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn’t check for a registered signature, that should work fine.

I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don’t have to do so.

I think that there’s a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don’t need to install an alternative firmware on your phone — it’s not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn’t registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that’s going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.

Even if you can handle installing the alternate firmware, a lot of developers probably just aren’t going to bother trying to develop software without being registered.

I wouldn’t put it entirely outside the realm of possibility, but I think that that’s probably unlikely.

The entire US only has about 161 million people working at the moment. In order for a 97 million shift to happen, you’d have to manage to transition most human-done work in the US to machines, using one particular technology, in 10 years.

Is that technically possible? I mean, theoretically.

I’m pretty sure that to do something like that, you’d need AGI. Then you’d need to build systems that leveraged it. Then you’d need to get it deployed.

What we have today is most-certainly not AGI. And I suspect that we’re still some ways from developing AGI. So we aren’t even at Step 1 on that three-part process, and I would not at all be surprised if AGI is a gradual development process, rather than a “Eureka” moment.