@oblomov I mean, it's a gamble right?
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@oblomov I mean, it's a gamble right? If you pick something that doesn't stay in fashion ten years from now, "just simply build it from source" could very well mean bootstrapping a decade old operating system from source. assuming everything in your dependency hierarchy got preserved.
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undefined oblomov@sociale.network shared this topic
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@oblomov I mean, it's a gamble right? If you pick something that doesn't stay in fashion ten years from now, "just simply build it from source" could very well mean bootstrapping a decade old operating system from source. assuming everything in your dependency hierarchy got preserved.
@aeva it absolutely is a gamble, but it'd be a gamble either way. But I think the sources would give better chances of a positive outcomes.
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@oblomov I mean, it's a gamble right? If you pick something that doesn't stay in fashion ten years from now, "just simply build it from source" could very well mean bootstrapping a decade old operating system from source. assuming everything in your dependency hierarchy got preserved.
@aeva @oblomov having once worked (in ~2012) on a "rational reconstruction" project for a 25+-year-old software system where the source code might have been available (on magnetic tape in someone's garage, perhaps), we didn't bother to try to dig it up, because even if we had gotten the tapes, getting the equipment to read them and then trying to assemble an emulation environment for decades-old LISP seemed not worth it.
We worked from the 700-page dissertation instead, but there were indeed many things that were vague enough we didn't feel confident in what the original had done. Source code probably would have helped us a fair bit even if we couldn't run it, but I can't imagine a process by which a runnable version could have survived all the tech changes of the intervening years.
There are game preservationists doing really interesting projects (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3102071.3102092 is an example and this site which seems semi-defunct has an example: https://gisst.dev/). ROM-based games are indeed much easier to preserve. I crossed paths in grad school with someone who wrote about Adobe Flash as a platform, and I'm sure many of those games are essentially lost to inadequate emulation fidelity.
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@aeva @oblomov having once worked (in ~2012) on a "rational reconstruction" project for a 25+-year-old software system where the source code might have been available (on magnetic tape in someone's garage, perhaps), we didn't bother to try to dig it up, because even if we had gotten the tapes, getting the equipment to read them and then trying to assemble an emulation environment for decades-old LISP seemed not worth it.
We worked from the 700-page dissertation instead, but there were indeed many things that were vague enough we didn't feel confident in what the original had done. Source code probably would have helped us a fair bit even if we couldn't run it, but I can't imagine a process by which a runnable version could have survived all the tech changes of the intervening years.
There are game preservationists doing really interesting projects (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3102071.3102092 is an example and this site which seems semi-defunct has an example: https://gisst.dev/). ROM-based games are indeed much easier to preserve. I crossed paths in grad school with someone who wrote about Adobe Flash as a platform, and I'm sure many of those games are essentially lost to inadequate emulation fidelity.
@tiotasram @oblomov yup. I have no idea how to run any of my old macromedia director projects. well, I have one idea, which is I found my pirated copy of macromedia director 9 in some old backups, but i'm not gonna run vintage warez on my main computer.
honestly the most surprising thing in retrospect is that things that rely on a special runtime to run are just as much a mixed bag as anything else for software preservation
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@aeva @oblomov having once worked (in ~2012) on a "rational reconstruction" project for a 25+-year-old software system where the source code might have been available (on magnetic tape in someone's garage, perhaps), we didn't bother to try to dig it up, because even if we had gotten the tapes, getting the equipment to read them and then trying to assemble an emulation environment for decades-old LISP seemed not worth it.
We worked from the 700-page dissertation instead, but there were indeed many things that were vague enough we didn't feel confident in what the original had done. Source code probably would have helped us a fair bit even if we couldn't run it, but I can't imagine a process by which a runnable version could have survived all the tech changes of the intervening years.
There are game preservationists doing really interesting projects (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3102071.3102092 is an example and this site which seems semi-defunct has an example: https://gisst.dev/). ROM-based games are indeed much easier to preserve. I crossed paths in grad school with someone who wrote about Adobe Flash as a platform, and I'm sure many of those games are essentially lost to inadequate emulation fidelity.
@tiotasram @aeva this is also quite a relevant point, but I think it's a bit orthogonal, it has more to do with the matter of physical storage, which would be equally problematic regardless of whether it's source or the built artifact.
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@tiotasram @oblomov yup. I have no idea how to run any of my old macromedia director projects. well, I have one idea, which is I found my pirated copy of macromedia director 9 in some old backups, but i'm not gonna run vintage warez on my main computer.
honestly the most surprising thing in retrospect is that things that rely on a special runtime to run are just as much a mixed bag as anything else for software preservation
@aeva @tiotasram ah binary source file formats. Somehow manage to get the worst of both worlds 8-D
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@aeva @tiotasram ah binary source file formats. Somehow manage to get the worst of both worlds 8-D
@oblomov @tiotasram i'm including the likes of python and web browsers in the category of special runtime languages, but yes
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@kim @karlauerbach I'll note that Perl mostly isn't that way. It is backward compatible to an absurd degree. I can't explain why that isn't a feature many people consider valuable enough to choose it over Python (I do, but don't have a choice at work). But I'm excited to be able to use Go for most of my new code, including at work, and it also largely avoids the problem (via a wildly different mechanism, but the end result is I can distribute my software to any Linux box and it Just Works).
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Il partigiano Tonino https://viacabane.wordpress.com/2020/03/04/il-partigiano-tonino/
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Ma non hanno il bidet! E dunque non sono sessualmente emancipati come noi. #Francia: nuova legge sul matrimonio, "consenso è essenziale per ogni rapporto sessuale" | Euronews https://it.euronews.com/2026/01/29/francia-nuova-legge-sul-matrimonio-consenso-e-essenziale-per-ogni-rapporto-sessuale
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@aeva @halcy sounds good. i've seen a few games with vertex shading style and it makes the picture supremely readable. (last thing i played was go-go town)
i just listed rendering components; as to actual geometry and style i have a few more things i want to try. many problems to solve simultaneously. sometimes i feel like i'm an AI model in training myself.
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#OpenAI si è fatta rimontare
Da Google ad Anthropic negli ultimi mesi i software di AI più innovativi sono arrivati da altre aziende, che ora le contendono il primato
Leggi tutto: https://ilpost.link/cEn9K7WBIV
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@technicalotter sure
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@aeva Swagatha Christie?
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@oblomov @tiotasram i'm including the likes of python and web browsers in the category of special runtime languages, but yes
