There is nobody with more dedication than IP lawyers and Nintendo.

And where would you download from, that is seen as legal sharing of someone else’s IP?

The closest you could get is by locating the ROM file in some PC remakes, assuming there’s no “protection” on them.

Again, playing around the “legal” way to do things. In reality, it’s different.

People buying the console for the games that are on that console, not generations before, are 100% fine.

Beside, it’s not something you have to fiddle with to get it work. Either a patch come, or you’re on your own.

It is not illegal to emulate a game that you own.

In a lot of place it is illegal to circumvent technical protection measures, which is technically required for almost anything starting from NES era. Making it impossible to “legally” rip your own games (yes, even in places where there IS a tax to allow private copy of content you bought). So the only way you can do that is by downloading it, where there is no “legal” way to distribute it in the first place, so “legally” you can’t download it either.

I’m not defending the practice, I’m saying that if you’re going the “legal” defense, you’re going to have a bad time if it gets attention. Fortunately, suing every single gamer on earth is not an attractive prospect.

Mario. Zelda. Metroid. For a time the occasional Splatoon. Maybe a Wario once in a while too. Some Pikmin. Even the built-in (paid) list of emulator games are attractive.

Also, you severely underestimate the convenience factor for a lot of people. Yeah, I have a Steam Deck, and 95% of the time, it’s a completely seamless experience. With consoles, it’s 100% of the time. People want a “I turn it on, I start a game”, not a “I turn it on, I might be able to start a game, and sometimes it needs a bit of fiddling, not much, but, more than zero. And sure, I could have this or that other thing by going there and running that, you know, sometimes”.

Part of the difficulty is that Nintendo have hitsquads that will blow your city if you even look sideways at one of the screw.

I see some problems here.

An LLM providing “an opinion” is not a thing, as far as current tech does. It’s just statistically right or wrong, and put that into word, which does not fit nicely with real use cases. Also, lots of tools already have autofix that can (on demand) handle many minor issues you mention, without any LLM. Assuming static analysis is already in place and decent tooling is used, this would not have to reach either a human or an AI agent or anything before getting fixed with little resources.

As anecdotal evidence, we regularly look into those tools on the job. Granted, we don’t have billions of lines of code to check, but so far it’s at best useless. Another anecdotal evidence is the recent outburst from the curl project (and other, following suite) getting a mountain of issues that are bogus.

I have no doubt that there is a place for human-sounding review and advice, alongside other more common uses like completion and documentation, but ultimately these systems are not able to think by design. The work still has to be done. And can’t go much beyond platitudes. You ask how common the horrible cases are, but that might not be the correct question. Horrific comments are easy to spot and filter out. Perfectly decent looking “minor fixes” that are well worded, follow guidelines, and pass all checks, while introducing an off by one error or suddenly decides to swap two parameters that happens to be compatible and make sense in context are the issue. And those, even if rare (empirically I’d say they are not that rare for now) are so much harder to spot without full human analysis, are a real threat.

Yet another anecdotal… yes, that’s a lot. Given the current hype, I can only base my findings on personal experience, mostly. I use AI-based code completion, assuming it’s short enough to check at a glance, and the context is small enough that it can’t make mistakes. At most two-three lines at time. Even in this context, while checking that the generated code matches what I was going to write, I’ve seen a handful of mistakes slip through over a few months. It makes me dread what could get through a PR system, where the codebase is not necessarily fresh in the mind of the reviewer.

This is not to say that none of that is useful, but if it were to be, it would require extremely high level of trust, far higher than current human intervention (which is also not great and source of mistakes, I’m very aware of that) to be. The goal should not be to emulate human mistakes, but to make something better.

The more Ukraine do that, the less everyone else have to do it. Good.

I’m self-hosting my mails; no need for another third party that will decide whatever whenever. The major difficulty is the decades of things that are reliant on the old one.

And I just said that google works fine for search, despite people claiming it’s on the decline, broken, unusable, etc. That’s not to move toward qwant, who are no less shady, burn money (sometimes coming from public money…), and despite wonderful claim of an autonomous index, completely stop working when Bing is down. As far as recommendations for search engine goes, google (and Bing for that matter) are far less disingenuous. All usable search engines these days are backed by the big ones anyway. Something like https://openwebsearch.eu/ would be a better alternative, assuming it follows on its promises.

The two thing I use most, by far, from Google, is gmail and basic search.

Gmail, I’m looking to move away from it now, but I currently have every little addition to it disabled. Basic inbox and tags, no automatic filtering, no categories, no nothing.

Search, my browser is set to open the “web” tab with the query, no transformation, no summary, no “for you”, no AI garbage, no “we thought you wanted video so there’s only video in the replies”. It still works fine.

Basically, none of what they added for years… maybe decade at this point, had held a glimmer of interest from me. It feels like this trend will continue. I just want something very basic that works.

I’m mainly interested in Japanese, so I’m currently looking at https://www.renshuu.org/ . In addition to just throwing random stuff at you, it gots some more in-depth training, explanations of stuff (something that never happened in duolingo), additional hints for alphabets including some mnemonics, and years of dedicated experience in the language. I can’t tell how it would feel long term, but so far even having some basic explanations is a great improvement.

People are unfair with this “CEO”. Its statement helped me move on from duolingo, which has seen significant decline in quality while never going beyond “a moderately bad way to start learning”, toward better, more developed, more cared for, cheaper, solutions.

So, thanks for that.

Jack Dorsey hasn’t been around for a long time.