Technically they make all/most of their money on the games people buy - the PS5 is just barely profitable[0] (but only at its massive scale of >20M units), and the xbox series X supposedly still sells at a $100-200 loss[1].
Why are you making that comparison? Nintendo is known for their strategy of using cheap/old parts in innovative ways to both increase hardware profit margins, and create lock-in (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...). They make quite a bit of money on each Switch sold, as they have on every console previous.
Nintendo lives soley of their games and consoles (unlike Sony and Microsoft), and they do need profit to survive. but they always pushed boundaries and try to deliver the best gameplay.
There are a lot of ways to increase profit, using outdated hardware doesn’t seem the safest way. I prefer to focus on the innovation Nintendo keeps delivering, regardless.
What are "fair use rights" in this context? Fair use specifically concerns creating derivative works. You don't by default have a right to use Nintendo's IP however you like, no matter how virtuous or benign you think your use is. You are only licensed to use their products in the ways that they permit.
Fair use (specifically the American variant) is a constitutional and statutory doctrine that balances the rights of the copyright holder and society's. It's decided by 4 factors, weighed "holistically" and individually. Ultimately it's up to each judge to decide whether fair use is present or not. And it applies to all possible infringments of copyrights, not just derivative works.
Thank you for confirming that fair use is not a right. Second, yes it absolutely concerns derivative works as it is a concept in the domain of copyright. While not every violation of copyright is a derivative work, only derivative works are justified under fair use. For instance, piracy can never be justified under fair use. The new work must be transformative to a significant degree.
This topic on the other hand has nothing to do with fair use as there is no derivative work being created. It also isn't a copyright violation, it's a violation of the DMCA. Specifically it violates the DMCA's provision that prohibits distributing tools used to violate the copyright of other work.
> While not every violation of copyright is a derivative work, only derivative works are justified under fair use.
Absolutely not.
Just as an example, the Sony v. Universal case involved direct copying from the TV stream to a VHS tape. Not only that, but it saved Sony itself from the contributory infringment claim too, not just the hypothetical users from their hypothetical direct infringment.
As for the DMCA issues, they're probably unconstitutional. Because fair use is constitutionally required (as held by SCOTUS in Eldred and Golan), a law that results in the doctrine being basically impaled by proxy can not stand.
This is the same rationale the court used in the VHS case. Because a fair use was found, Sony was allowed to continue making their devices. If it was tried today, the DMCA's anti-trafficking provisions wouldn't be allowed to stand IMO, as they would conflict constitutionally with the fair use requirement and factual finding in its favor by the court.
I think the fair use rights would be "you are allowed to write an emulator for the switch and any software components necessary to make games interoperable to the platform of your choosing."
And while you are allowed to implement technical measures to prevent people from doing this or make it difficult you shouldn't have any legal protection.
That has nothing to do with fair use. That is a misuse of the term which has a specific meaning in the context of justifying derivative works of copywritten material.
You are allowed to make an emulator because there is nothing that says it's illegal. Under the DMCA, you are not allowed to distribute tools which help in the circumvention of copyright, which is what this tool does. It allows people to bypass the copyright protections Nintendo has put in place to prevent people from running copied games without permission.
The fair use right that you have is the right to make copies of works for your own use. If you own mario party on the switch and would like to play it on your computer you are allowed to do make a copy of the work to do so.
Tools that facilitate this legal use shouldn't be an able to be taken down. It doesn't matter if you think they're using those tobacco accessories for something else.
But a tool that allows you to break say HBO's streaming DRM wouldn't get this protection.
The popular LSD and psychadelic advocacy online and elsewhere is an expression of the mainstream ideology. The foundation of our collective ideology tells us these drugs should have some profound life-altering and improving effect. Obviously, when examined critically, the premise is ridiculous on its face. Everyone I know who regularly does these types of drugs is not really doing much else with their lives. As for Steve Jobs, he was not a regular LSD user, he was a baby boomer who bragged about using it to make himself seem unique or different, like many of his generation.
You see a similar sort of popular collective delusion with people who claim Cannabis cures cancer or other disease. Sorry but hard no. There is no such thing as "Medical Marijuana." It's simply marketing and propaganda to get the public into associating virtue with Cannabis use, with the end goal of eventually changing policy.
You seem to have heard one extreme, that cannabis cures diseases, and you’ve snapped back to the other extreme where you state there is no such thing as a medical use of cannabis. Have you seen the studies? Have you looked into CBD?
Yes, there’s a lot of exaggeration if you’re listening to some person who knows nothing about science, but there are true benefits with it as well. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water as they say.
You can't exactly placebo cannabis. Anyone taking part in the study wants to take cannabis so when they take the unmarked plant product out of the packet they will tell the person running the study how amazing it is. The scientist will then report 100% success because everyone taking part is loving the new treatment.
Imagine if medical heroin was a new discovery. "I had depression so I took medical heroin and now I'm cured, we should be giving this to kids instead of pills". Because it makes you feel good and that reduces pain, people would believe it's a magical cure for everything rather than just being a painkiller. Ironically, medical heroin would actually be a safer and more effective cure for all of the things cannabis is being suggested for. The only real downside to heroin is the cost and that's what causes the societal problems.
I'm sorry but your preconceptions are way off. Medical studies on cannabis are not just about smoking weed and feeling better because you got high from it.
Here are the two main areas of research:
- For two forms of treatment-resistant epileptic seizures, Lennox–Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome, it is the closest you can get to a "miracle" treatment -- significantly reduces seizures with no clear downside other than feeling the effects. You can extract just the specific cannabinoid (cannabidiol) needed to treat it, so that there are no unwanted psychological effects from it.
- It is nearly irreplaceable for treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. The alternatives (prochlorperazine, promethazine) just don't have a cost-benefit analysis that adds up the way cannabis does.
And two important areas with a lower quality evidence are anorexia and migraines.
It's just another "experience" in life. Many have found it significant. I agree it's prob not some panacea thing... but clearly it let's people feel some other way of thinking and feeling things in their life and the world.
Which can probably be an impetus to solve some forms of depression, or have a change in life etc.
So I think you're partially right but also partially wrong at writing it all off as useless or some fad.
Is it possible that people just don't want to talk to you about their medical treatment? I know perfectly productive, happy people that use marijuana for a variety of purposes, both recreational and medical. But in general, people don't share their medication list with the world, so it doesn't surprise me you're not running across them, especially with this view.
Good point. While it seems obvious to me that LLMs can never be anything more than fancy Markov chains, in my experience it seems the majority of human "logic" does not operate much differently. Very rare to encounter someone who is able to think or speak critically. Most regurgitate canned responses based on keywords.
> Given an optimizing compiler, the first function (count(a)) is likely to just immediately return the size of the backing vector. The function is nearly free.
That's true but devirtualization optimizations tend to be pretty brittle and it's very easy to fall of the optimizer's blessed path and end up back to doing to a virtual call without realizing it.
Worse, once the devirtualization optimization has failed, any further optimizations you would get from inlining the call will also fail.
If you're programming in C++, you probably do care about this level of performance, and in that case, it's nice to program in a style that guarantees it instead of hoping for a sufficiently smart compiler.
Unless you are in a hot loop (where you may not use virtual methods to begin with), I don’t think that performance difference is significant. Virtual calls have a slight overhead, but far from serious, and similarly not inlining something that you call only a single time for example is not the end of the world.
The problem with not inlining is less with the overhead of the function call itself, and more the loss of further optimization opportunities. Consider this (trivial) example:
main() {
int x = foo() + 3;
}
int foo() {
return 5;
}
Without inlining you have both the overhead of the call and the arithmetic addition. If you can inline the call then you get:
main() {
int x = 5 + 3;
}
But more importantly, the optimizer can now also eliminate the addition too:
main() {
int x = 8;
}
This is obviously a trivial example, but in real-world code, the optimization options opened up after inlining are important.
> If you're programming in C++, you probably do care about this level of performance, and in that case, it's nice to program in a style that guarantees it instead of hoping for a sufficiently smart compiler.
Neither implementation guarantees any particular sequence of assembly instructions. Both require hoping that a sufficiently smart compiler will compile it to a sufficiently optimal sequence of instructions.
> In practice, non-virtual function calls are reliably compiled to fairly efficient code while virtual calls are much less reliable.
Like I said, this echoes the conventional wisdom that most C++ developers seem to retain. The compiler landscape has changed since that wisdom was formed, since the advent of LTO and devirtualization optimizations.
So has programmer methodology. Throwing virtual calls everywhere is a relic of the past from the era of OOP fetishism. If you actually have statically verifiable leafs for virtual calls then you didn't even need a virtual call to begin with. It's code slop.
Strongly agree on the philosophy - but alas my experience with this specific case has not been great.
I’ve seen it simplify patches of code here and there, and that does apply to the trivial examples given in the post this topic links to - a function call involving a known child class. But add some basic real-world complexity and it quickly gets too complex for the optimiser to prove that it knows for sure what child class it is dealing with.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if we live in such a world in the next decade.
We won't live in that world in the next decade or even in the next 100 years. The technology upon which GPT is built is a dead-end in terms of human-level intelligence.
GPT is an elaborate parrot. As convincing as it is, it's not actually fully capable of doing most if not all tasks that competent humans can do. The largest takeaway for me is that it has shown that intelligence can be mimicked pretty well and perhaps many people are more like parrots than they are "intelligent" creatures.
I challenge you to explain how an entity that isn’t capable of something we might reasonably call “creativity” or “intelligence” produced this output. Was it in a corpus somewhere? (Google translate it if you can’t read French). The “///“ were inserted by me as paragraph breaks because otherwise HN eats them.
> Write a poem in a made-up language that looks superficially similar to French
I threw that poem into google translate. I think it was actually just French? It didn't actually fulfill your prompt. Is your claim that it's ability to write a poem is a sign of creativity and intelligence? A language model writing a poem is one of the things I'd expect a language model to be able to do. Certainly impressive, but not one of the particularly interesting or surprising things I've seen GPT-3/4 do.
I don’t understand how GPT poetry is supposed to refute the standard refrain that GPT is a statistical parrot that has “learned” what next-word keeps a text sounding poemy. It operates on the same principles as when it composes boilerplate business emails or physics theories. Never mind that you asked for fake-French and got actual-French talking about fake-French.
lmao this is the best example of chat GPT not working at all, this isn't "a made-up language that looks superficially similar to French", it _is_ French, and it doesn't even rhyme, because chat GPT can't rhyme in French for some reason
hi dang, sorry to be annoying but i have no other way to reach you. I've contacted you at hn@ycombinator.com over my account but haven't received a reply. Did you receive my email? if not, please email me at the address in my account at your earliest convenience. thank you.
