Notices by Andrew Plotkin (zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place)

@cstross That also means back-pressure on the tech industry, where "new phenomena" are people inventing things rather than observational science.

It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical mass of new users; language dies on the vine.

@sinbad @eviltrout Agree.

@cstross I would believe if if “unpasteurized milk” weren’t a transparent excuse for “legalize selling spoiled food to save on food handling costs”.

Mastodon will never be the next big thing, and that’s why I’m on Mastodon.

@cstross Yep same. (sorry, typo in first message — I logged out of Twitter in 2022, the day Musk took over. Typo fixed)

Creating an empty dummy account for anti-squatting reasons is a good idea, but eh, logging in *twice* in two years is too much work for me. I’ll just let it alone.

@cstross This is a misreading though. I got off Twitter in 2022. That was my decision to stop supporting the platform. I was no longer a Daily Active User.

This week I deactivatated my account. That was a purely selfish, defensive decision; I wanted to reduce my searchable online presence. (I’m not disappearing, but I want to be off the list of People Searchable On Twitter.) That doesn’t hurt the platform; it only hurts the public record.

@cstross Ironically, I stopped supporting Twitter *financially* in 2011 when I decided to only ever use third-party clients and chrono timeline. That was a decision to never see ads and promoted tweets again. We all loved Twitter then, but I still wouldn’t suffer through ads for it.

I, too, am looking at the Annapurna thing and saying “What”

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/kentucky-route-zero-and-stray-publisher-annapurna-interactive-has-collapsed-with-its-entire-staff-quitting-en-masse/

I have no contact with this situation at all, it doesn’t affect me, but… what

Colin Post (who has spoken at NarraScope) now has a grant-supported project for digital game preservation for libraries and academic institutions.

https://soe.uncg.edu/rdi/dgil/

Not much there yet, but I’ve been involved in the preliminary discussions. I can imagine some kind of indie game license coming out of this and getting adopted by the game dev community.

And now, just one more thing!

Okay, not an official “one more thing”. But I just came up with a trick that I’ve been wanting for *years*: a way to turn off the spellcheck marker (the red squiggle), *system-wide* on MacOS, for all apps, forever.

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2024/06/neutering-spellcheck-on-macos

(I’m not talking about the “Autocorrect” option. I’m talking about the “Check Spelling While Typing” option.)

@feoh @brainwane Please tell me that tech conference shanties are becoming a thing…

I guess the takeaway from the xz backdoor situation is:

If you’re an open-source project maintainer, and somebody starts getting on your case for not doing enough free work for them, you reply “big Jia Tan energy there” and then block them forever.

@powersoffour Dont think it was mentioned but these were all condensed talks

#GDC2024 Okay one more talk: what’s new in game history.
Phil Salvador, Laine Nooney, Henry Lowood, Kendra Albert, Chloe Appleby

Crowded room! Albeit this is one of the half-size rooms at thr conference center. Still, a lot of people interested in this.

(I know Phil from Myst fandom — he helped get a bunch of historical video from the production of Riven digitized and archived.)

Phil talking about citizen archivists and fan preservation projects. “The first line of defense”. Wheeler Dealers (Dani Bunten’s first game), found and preserved. Design documents from Donkey Kong. Games for thr Casio Loopy.

(I am part of this too, with my Infocom game file archive.)

There is rising recognition and support for community preservation projects. NCSoft licensing a City of Heroes fan server.

I sort of knew this but it had not sunk in: “cookbook of your favorite videogame” is a big enough genre to populate a shelf.