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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Some things cannot be effectively regulated in this manner. At all.

    There is simply no way to stop people from building their own 3D printers. There are too many open source designs, and they can be built with very simple parts that are readily available at the hardware store. Most hobbyist-level 3D printers basically come as a kit that they have to assemble themselves anyways. What happens next? Background checks to buy stepper motors? Background checks to buy a microcontroller?

    To me this is like trying to mandate government backdoors in encryption algorithms. There is literally nothing that would stop criminals from just using an open source encryption algorithm that doesn’t have a backdoor, so you end up just making it so all legitimate communications are less secure than they should be.



  • the music streaming platforms basically screw over the artists to make that feasible, with the excuse usually being that artists can make their real money touring and selling merch.

    the cost of producing music is also infintesimal compared to that of producing film and television. the whole music industry itself is pretty small in comparison, yet Spotify costs about as much as a streaming TV service.

    to scale that model up to film and TV would mean either a much higher base price, or a lot less overall content being made. these are viable paths, but both come with big trade offs.



  • this doesn’t really answer my questions, though.

    netflix was able to afford that much content back then for two reasons

    1. they were flush with capital from investors, spending more money than they were making to promote growth.

    2. netflix wasn’t running new content, they were essentially licensing “reruns” of content that already had its primary run elsewhere.

    basically, everyone got used to a certain lifestyle being subsidized by cheap capital and investors misplaced belief in perpetual growth. nobody has yet to explain to me how this could have been made sustainable.


  • the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.

    content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money

    so it seems to me there are three paths here:

    1. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)

    2. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price

    3. studios branch off into competing streaming services

    i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out










  • There isn’t a lot of evidence to back these claims up. For most users, it’s entirely transparent. You would never know a game shipped with Denuvo unless your first launch is offline and it fails to authenticate.

    There have been games that had their performance impacted, but I don’t think it’s the norm. Games like Doom 2016 shipped with it and saw no performance gains when Denuvo was eventually patched out. I think titles like Rime and RE8 are usually the exception, but it’s something I always watch out for in reviews. If a game runs bad, I don’t buy it, regardless of the cause.

    Denuvo has proven successful for 2 reasons:

    1. It’s actually effective. Games go months or even years without a crack.

    2. It’s nowhere near as draconian as what came before (TAGES, StarForce, SecuROM, etc). Most players aren’t even aware of its existence. They just buy these games on Steam and they work, which is why all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in these threads never accomplishes anything.


  • Remastered CGI and 16:9 would be nice, but I’ll be plenty happy with the original 4:3 presentation. Assuming this release is cut from the new masters made for streaming (and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t), it will look pretty damn good.

    Later DS9 seasons were also shot for 16:9 with a 4:3 safe zone, but I would still be fine with keeping that whole show 4:3 as well.

    The expanded frame wouldn’t add a whole lot to the experience, because they still shot to capture everything in the viewable 4:3 area. I doubt much effort was put into actually composing the shots for widescreen beyond making sure crew and equipment were not visible in frame.

    The problem CBS has with DS9 is the extensive use of CGI throughout live action scenes (like Odo shapeshifting). It’s a lot easier to get away with just upscaling old CGI when most of the relevant shots are 100% CGI and don’t need to be composited back in to the original photography.


  • You see that, CBS? Warner figured out how to remaster and release their serialized '90s science fiction drama set aboard a space station on Blu-Ray. Surely doing the same for your serialized '90s science fiction drama set aboard a space station is not too tall of an order.

    With the WGA and SAG strikes shutting down all production of new content, there’s never been a better time to put your editors and vfx artists to work remastering an old classic.