I wonder how many trillions of floors Diablo 1 had if they had used this weird way of marketing No Man’s Sky uses.

Strangely enough officials of other stake holders never do anything preventative in this area.

What is stopping them from reintroducing those requirements in the future?

I am honestly surprised about this. I sort of assumed that whole sector had been at zero for at least a decade.

No, that is generally what we refer to as hardware. Arguably the whole point of the term software is to refer to the bits that aren’t physical in the overall system.

Certainly means that large companies didn’t invent digital distribution as some form to eliminate physical distribution as an anti-consumer move. Consumers (via piracy) invented it for convenience.

Valve didn’t invent the idea, piracy did. You could download full games years before any legal distribution channel allowed you to do so.

Well, sure, but there are limits. In e.g. a game like Dwarf Fortress you could probably add hundreds of different production chains and professions without running into too much trouble of individual players keeping track and using all of them. If you added maps each requiring one of dozens of different tactics or strategies to a multiplayer shooter it wouldn’t feel like a single game any more and would probably just splinter the community into groups where each just plays one or a few of those maps.

It might make sense to have an admin panel for account related functionality, basically do these cars still exist or have they not checked in for three years at all. Maybe an owner reset in case of auctions of vehicles by a bank or something similar. But it certainly makes no sense that someone could have access to the functionality of the car itself without at the very least locking out the current owner (via that owner reset) and thus being very noticeable.

a toxic player base

Isn’t that basically all competitive games?

I feel there is a fundamental difference between games like Dwarf Fortress or survival games or even open world story-driven games getting new content though that allows players to explore different options when replaying the game and games like this where the game play loop is inherently short and people are somewhat forced to do the ‘optimal strategy’ whatever that happens to be at the time.

Keep in mind that the people advocating for AI in all kinds of fields without good reason now are the very same people who never liked the privacy rules in the first place.

You are technically correct and yet you are missing the original point that people expect the super-intelligent AGI of science fiction when they hear the term, no matter how much all those lesser forms are AI too by the definition of the scientific field.

Neither the position to keep all the old solutions because they are old nor to adopt all the new solutions because they are new is sensible.

Some old solutions worked in the past and don’t work anymore because the actual world around us changed (the bits outside our control, e.g. some resources might be more sparse but were more plentiful in the past, human populations are larger, the world is more interconnected,…).

Some old solutions appeared to work in the past because we didn’t have the knowledge about their flaws yet but now that we do we need new ones.

Some new solutions are genuine improvements, others are merely sold by marketing and hype.

Some new solutions have studies, data or even logic and math backing them up while others are adopted on a whim or even contrary to evidence or logic.

We can not escape the fact that the world is complex and requires evaluation on a case by case basis and simplistic positions like “keep everything old” or “replace everything old” do not work.

To be fair ActivityPub is a pretty shitty protocol in terms of scaling up with all the quadratic communication and caching growth it requires. Not that ATprotocol is better, just that there is room for improvement on ActivityPub before it could be used on a world-wide scale for the entire human population the way major social media sites are right now.