earthworm

A remake should always try to stay as close as possible to the original for its initial presentation. The intention of a remake is to become the current market replacement of an old product, for various reasons.

Reading your comment, it seems like you’re locked onto the idea that all remasters are lazy, low quality cash grabs and that remakes should actually just be high quality remasters.

It sounds like you wanted a high quality remaster of Silent Hill 2, and instead they gave you a remake and never released a digital version of the original. So now everyone’s playing the remake and calling it Silent Hill 2, instead of properly differentiating it as Silent Hill 2 Remake/Silent Hill 2 (2025).

And I agree that the situation is ass for navigating online conversations.

But a remake should not “stay as close as possible to the original”. That’s what remasters are for.

The only thing they should do is be good.

(And also release the originals DRM-free on GOG.)

The only games I 100% are the ones where llooking for weird secrets is still fun.

If it’s just “collect all 2 million Pokémon because… you get an achievement”, I’m out.

Remasters and remakes are two different things.

A remaster is what you describe - technical improvements such as graphics and framerate.

Remakes are (supposed to be) additive - improving the story, changing un-fun mechanics, implementing new stuff that still fits the themes of the game (or that they originally wanted to include, but couldn’t due to budget or time or publishing constraints).

If you’re looking through nostalgia lens, yea, a remaster is all you need. But, when it’s not a studio just looking for a cash grab, devs can have plenty of reasons for wanting a second crack at their game.

FF7 Remake is a great example. Sure, there’s been a lot of controversy around the changes. But I’ve really enjoyed a lot of them because it’s different from the original. It didn’t ruin the discussion - it added to the conversation.

I still haven’t gotten into this series, because it feels like there’s so much homework you have to do before you can play specific titles.

My second run through, I knew what I needed to buy vs what I could come back for later.

Didn’t need to farm rosaries until the end of Act 2, when it was easy because of the tall bugs outside the gay robot boss room.

Google will soon stop you sideloading unverified apps – here’s what that means for you

Signal CEO Whittaker said that in the worst case scenario, they would work with partners and the community to see if they could find ways to circumvent these rules. Signal also did this when the app was blocked in Russia or Iran. “But ultimately, we would leave the market before we had to comply with dangerous laws like these.”

This is why we need the ability to sideload apps.

Any chance this will lead Microsoft to re-evaluate its use of AI?

Launching October 1st, Gemini For Home is a suite of new AI-powered features for Google’s smart home hardware and software.

The biggest change: Gemini is replacing Google Assistant on all of Google’s smart speakers, all the way back to the original Google Home speaker. This LLM-powered upgrade, announced at Google I/O, will be available through an Early Access program at first, with a wider rollout planned for next year.

On smart speakers, Gemini brings an entirely new voice assistant that uses and understands natural language, can interpret context, and can pull in more real-time information. You still activate it with the wake words “hey Google,” but Google Assistant has been evicted.

“Gemini for Home is the intelligence for your entire home,” Anish Kattukaran, head of product at Google Home and Nest, tells The Verge. “It’s not going to just replace Assistant on speakers and displays, but it’s going to upgrade your other devices as well, your cameras and doorbells, where you interact with those devices, and bring those smarts collectively to your entire home.”

I’m not excited for Apple to invent smart homes after this, completing the duopoly of LLMs being in everyone’s homes even harder than before.

Long live Home Assistant

🫡

I downvote because it’s paywalled.

Paywalled links are just ads with extra steps.

How long until parliament decides to push the undo button on this stupid law?

Corporations don’t have stable political identities.

They’ll promote trans people if it makes them money.

And then sell trans people to ICE the next quarter if it makes them even more money.

And then use a shell company to sell trans merch to the people boycotting them.

Jones says that linguists and subtitlers are not necessarily against AI – but at the moment, it’s making practitioners’ lives harder rather than easier. “In every industry, AI is being used to replace all the creative things that bring us joy instead of the boring, tedious tasks we hate doing,” she says.

Those are definitely words.

“We show that by exploiting the physics of specular reflection, an adversary can inject phantom obstacles or erase real ones using only inexpensive mirrors,” the researchers wrote in a paper submitted to the journal Computers & Security.

“Experiments on a full AV platform, with commercial-grade LIDAR and the Autoware stack, demonstrate that these are practical threats capable of triggering critical safety failures, such as abrupt emergency braking and failure to yield.”

I’d be fooled, too, at first - and suspicious (who’s fucking around with mirrors on the road?) - but I’d probably figure it out after a second.

My main concern is people could use these kinds of exploits to “jailbreak” robo-cars (or whatever we’re calling them) to behave in dangerous ways in real traffic.

It will not. The article is nostalgia and hopium-baiting.

Restarting a mass-manufacturing production line for something like once super-common CRT TVs would require a major investment that so far nobody is willing to front.

Meanwhile LCD and OLED technology have hit some serious technological dead-ends, while potential non-organic LED alternatives such as microLED have trouble scaling down to practical pixel densities and yields.

There’s a chance that Sony and others can open some drawers with old ‘thin CRT’ plans, dust off some prototypes and work through the remaining R&D issues with SED and FED for potentially a pittance of what alternative, brand-new technologies like MicroLED or quantum dot displays would cost.

Will it happen? Maybe not. It’s quite possible that we’ll still be trying to fix OLED and LCDs for the next decade and beyond, while waxing nostalgically about how much more beautiful the past was, and the future could have been, if only we hadn’t bothered with those goshdarn twisting liquid crystals.

Apple is one of the few companies whose cult I think could rival MAGA.

Tim Cook gets no brownie points from me for sucking up to 40-whatever-number-he-is.

Their policy to not be evil.

The content was great. The furry art between every paragraph was completely inoffensive and sometimes cute.

Using a picture of your (I assume) furry avatar presenting their ass in my general direction as the header/thumbnail almost made me not click.

It’s not even a furry thing.

It’s a you-look-so-unserious-right-now thing.