kmeisthax

DC and Marvel are more efficient at shutting out competition, not producing more books. The short answer to "why cannot new comic-book companies easily be created" is that it has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with the fact that nobody wants to be in direct competition with DC or Marvel.

In the late 80s, you had three different forces trying to push comic books (back) into the mainstream: speculators, graphic novels, and manga. I primarily covered the speculator boom because it's what ultimately killed off the big two, but concurrent with that was an indie comics boom. A lot of artists fled DC and Marvel the moment it was viable for them to do so and the indie companies they'd founded were actually giving the big two a run for their money for a bit. Some of those companies are still around, too!

The main problem is that indie comics didn't increase the standing of the genre. They were doing a lot of the same superhero comics as the big two, just with better terms for artists. As a result a lot of them wound up getting hurt by the big two going under rather than being able to capitalize on it.

There actually was a push to increase the range of comics being sold, too; that's what ultimately gave us the term "graphic novel". The problem is mainly that there isn't a hard distinction between "comic book" and "graphic novel". The latter was supposed to be for people why didn't want their work to carry the stigma of "comic book", but it ultimately wound up being used by the comic book companies anyway[3]. Still, there were some successful graphic novels, like Bone[0]; the main problem is just that it didn't usher in a wave of mass-market non-superhero comics. If you want to establish a medium you really need to carpet-bomb the entire market with it.

Ironically, part of the reason why manga got huge was because they had a decade head-start on this exact trend. In the 70s there were a lot of manga artists who called their books "gekiga" or "komaga"[1] and that spawned the entire seinen and josei demographic of modern manga. When companies started translating manga for the US they had lots of material to work with that western comics companies would never touch. Tokyopop cut their teeth with imports of girls comics, a thing that pretty much didn't exist in the US at all!

There's also webcomics - but that's not competition for comic books; it's competition for syndicated newspaper comic strips. (Japan calls these 4-koma.) One of the most irksome features of western comics is how much unnecessary fragmentation there is:

- A "comic book" is specifically a male-oriented superhero book sold in individual weekly volumes, which is predominantly but not entirely monopolized by DC & Marvel's rotting corpses

- A "comic strip" is any general audience comic distributed on a daily basis in newspapers, which is monopolized by Andrews McMeel Syndication

- A "webcomic" is a self-published[4] serialized work distributed online, usually for free, at high frequency (daily updates are common) and either in strip or book form.

- A "graphic novel" is a catch-all for any comic book that doesn't fit the comic book bucket, but sometimes it just means a collection of comic book volumes

- And "manga" is for import books from Japan (and "manhwa" for Korean books), which are far wider in scope purely because Japan's publishers had their shit together and America's didn't[2].

This fragmentation gets so particularly dumb that there is actually a thing called "original English-language manga", which specifically means any comic written in English but produced to manga standard. Because westerners who wanted to write comics that weren't superhero books dropped the graphic novel designation and started apeing the constraints of Japanese works. Oh, and this term also covers Megatokyo, a webcomic produced in a weird 2-by-2-koma standard specifically designed to split the difference between western comic strips and Japanese 4-koma. Confused yet?

If you want a good example of why categorization and taxonomy are dismal sciences, just point to this comment.

With that out of the way, you probably have also guessed that I don't think copyright plays a role in this. For the most part, it doesn't. But I do also want to point out that the big mistake a lot of copyright abolitionists make is assuming that copyright works like patents; i.e. that if DC owns Batman, then nobody is allowed to write stories about athletic rich guys moonlighting as superheroes. It's important to note, however, that copyright is actually really, really fucking narrow.

Fans chafe under copyright because fans want to do tributes and other things that don't strictly speaking step on the original creators' toes but are still legally problematic. But if you abandon the hope of, say, writing your own take on an existing superhero, you can actually still do a lot while not technically infringing. Toby Fox wrote two games totally aping the style of EarthBound[5], to the point where he's joked about how if MOTHER 3 came to the west, people would find out how unoriginal he is, and Nintendo's never bothered to sue him. Because there's nothing to sue over unless you're outright making a clone. Nothing stops you from writing your own superhero books aside from the fact that DC & Marvel have that particular corner of comics completely locked down and enshittified.

[0] Never underestimate the power of Scholastic to pump books into US schools.

[1] These literally mean "dramatic pictures" and "panel pictures" but I'd draw cultural parallels to "graphic novels" and "sequential art", respectively.

[2] There is an alternate universe where United Feature Syndicate realizes they can sell their own magazine full of weekly long-format comics and parallel reinvents Shonen Jump.

[3] Specifically as a synonym for trade paperbacks. No, I don't mean "upmarket paperback books", in comic books "trade paperback" specifically means "collections of previously published work" and sometimes they aren't even paperback. Manga calls these tankobons and most manga you buy in a store will be tankobons.

[4] Japanese: doujin

[5] Which itself aped the art style of the comic strip Peanuts, and was also aped by South Park

Oh my god. I just found the mirror universe version of that Japanese otaku antipiracy flamewar that keeps flaring up on Twitter every few months.

Gotta love how the phone runs the expensive spying model regardless of consent, purely so that people who withhold consent aren't rewarded with better battery life. As if some % of the battery was still Samsung's property for their own marketing purposes. Stay classy!

> React has one of the world's largest developer communities. Drupal Canvas code components are written in React, and we designed the developer experience around the tools, patterns, and workflows front-end JavaScript developers already know. They can use their preferred development tools, including modern AI-assisted workflows, without having to learn Drupal-specific concepts or conventions. We've continued to make that experience better, lowering the barrier for a much larger community of developers to build with Drupal.

Ok. As someone who hasn't shipped a Drupal site since halfway through the D8 cycle: is this better or worse than the tumor that is Gutenberg?

There's another wrinkle I didn't know about .name until someone else brought it up here. When you registered first.last.name you also got an e-mail forwarder for [email protected].

First off, it means selling doe.name separate from john.doe.name is literally impossible, because the e-mail forwarder only works if doe.name publishes the correct MX records. You cannot half-delegate a domain by record type, so .name can't shadow doe.name's MX record. So you're entirely correct that one of the two registrations gets denied because that's literally the only way the mail forwarder still works.

Second, it means hell for VeriSign's backend systems engineers. Along with the list separation you mentioned, any time someone registers first.last.name, it needs to also create a parallel registration for last.name, publish MX records on the corresponding subzone, and spin up a new mail server to forward mail for people who own a subdomain of last.name. I suspect this is part of why VeriSign wants to kill third-level domains more than anything else.

There is a good story in here about how economics as a profession is intellectually bankrupt. But at the same time, there is also a story about how the only hard data the economics profession can actually offer is actual transactions completed by disinterested, non-colluding, and independent individuals. Supply and demand curves only make sense when there is a genuine conflict between the supply and demand sides. LIBOR-like arrangements, where it's suppliers selling to each other, do not form a valid market because the demand side is also the supply side.

The magic Latin words to ward away CAC farmers[0] are "straight tender-to-tender transaction", aka "you're just moving money around, it's not a real transaction". I am wondering if we need a similar kind of mind-numbing rhetoric to refer to exchanges that are not valid markets: i.e. do not have opposing supply and demand. These exchanges nominally serve some kind of purpose - they balance supply across suppliers - but they should not be allowed to participate in price discovery as they are not a market.

[0] "Customer acquisition costs" refer to any money paid by a business to attract new customers only. A lot of business risk management is put into making sure your customer acquisition costs are not functionally a straight-up discount or giveaway.

What you want is to repeal DMCA 1201. It is specifically 1201 that is responsible for the most anti-preservation rulings. Custom servers are legally imperiled because Blizzard, the patient zero of the technofeudalist takeover of the US, sued a developer for releasing a Battle.net custom server and won because he didn't implement the CD Key check. It is fairly trivial to make a central server have DRM checks that a third-party replacement can't replicate, even though they legally have to, which makes them effectively illegal.

Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.

Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.

.name was special (derogatory). When you registered first.last.name, .name would give an authoritative NS record for first.last.name, but not last.name. What you think is happening is that .name is spinning up a second DNS zone for last.name, and then issuing a normal declaration, but it's way more cursed.

Delegating multiple levels down is allowed by DNS spec but almost never done, and causes problems. For starters, some registrars just straight up did not handle the first.last.name case at all. Which is particularly bad for .name because originally, you could only register third-level domains. Only later did .name added second-level domain registration.

This creates an obvious collision problem: if John Doe registers john.doe.name first, and then Jane Doe wants to register doe.name, what happens?

You might think that, obviously, both registrations stick. But this means John Doe owns a subdomain of Jane Doe's namespace, that Jane Doe cannot get rid of or otherwise control. When someone looks up records on john.doe.name, doe.name is never queried; .name skips it. This causes all sorts of problems for cookies: John Doe can now set cookies on Jane Doe's website, and Jane Doe's website always sets cookies that John Doe's website can read[0].

The time-reversed scenario (John Doe registers after Jane Doe) is even worse. Obviously, top-level domain operators should not be allowed to project subdomains onto other people's registrations like this. Like, imagine if Verisign decided you could register subdomains on someone else's domain, that they did not control and could not get rid of, if you paid them a little extra? There would be all sorts of shenanigans.

The alternative resolution is confiscation: when Jane Doe registers doe.name, John Doe loses his website. This is more in line with how you thought it was working. And, indeed, what Verisign is planning to do is basically this en masse, dropping all the third-level delegations. Probably because the operational headaches of managing two different conflicting delegation schemes was too much.

[0] This is actually a problem for any DNS suffix that is shared across multiple websites; there's a Public Suffix List that exists specifically to keep you from, say, writing cookies to .com that hit every website. But doe.name isn't exactly a public suffix: it's Jane Doe's personal website, one that just happens to have a suffix collision with another website because of a stupid idea someone had.

Get ready to be surprised, because the 800Mhz band used for AMPS (1G / analog cellular) was explicitly carved off as a no-receive zone by Congress because AT&T was pissed[0] anyone could just listen in on any cellphone conversation. I'm told the law actually makes it really difficult to legally sell fully open software-defined radios (SDR), even though nobody uses analog cellular anymore, because you still have to design the SDR to be tamper-proof against attempts to receive 800Mhz.

[0] Wikipedia also mentions the existence of cloning tools that would let you copy any AMPS subscriber ID and program another phone with the same number, stealing the subscriber's account. I suspect AT&T was more angry about that.

Modern games look samey because they all want the same result - photorealism - and aren't fussy about using an off-the-shelf solution - i.e. UE5 and Unity. We have absolutely insane levels of control over the rendering pipeline and almost everything is programmable; the GPU is an endless fountain of parallel programming. But in order to take advantage of any of that you have to actually start changing engine code, or write your own renderer, and games don't care because the default UE5 look is "good enough".

There is some standardization in that, if you issue geometry and sample textures normally, you will be relying on hardware units for rasterization and texture sampling, and those do have a relatively limited set of options for how they work. However, those options encompass most if not all of what 3D engines could ever want or need, even the early 3D ones that had all sorts of hacks. The kinds of things GPUs can't actually rasterize in hardware are things like NURBS or metaballs, but this doesn't matter because the industry settled on triangles[0] as the medium of real-time 3D really early on.

A lot of the look of old 3D games comes down to them doing things the lazy way, and I'm proud to say the lazy way is still very much supported - so long as you turn off features that didn't exist later on and limit yourself. I'm not as familiar with old DOS games, so I'll use the PS1 as an example. The "PS1 look" is very much a result of its incredibly limited rasterizer, whose limitations can be trivially emulated in modern hardware:

1. Don't allocate or bind a depth buffer. You will need to Z-sort your geometry every frame. Part of the "PS1 look" is that some games did it wrong; if you do it correctly you'll be burning performance for no visual benefit. Pick a scheme that breaks in a visually interesting way. Likewise make sure to not allocate any multisampling since the PS1 didn't anti-alias either.

2. Restrict the precision of vertices in your vertex shader by rounding them. The PS1 did vertex math with incredibly low precision and it makes vertices wobble.

3. Restrict the precision of UVs in your fragment shader. PS1 UVs were 0-255, so you want 1/256 precision.

4. Aggressively discard geometry that clips the edge of the viewport. The PS1 did not have proper polygon clipping; you just couldn't render off the end of the viewport, so games had to discard geometry and subdivide polygons to avoid things disappearing. This is another "if you do it well, nobody will notice" thing.

5. Turn off perspective-correct attribute interpolation; this will make your UVs warp and distort at certain angles. You do this with the `noperspective` attribute in GLSL.

6. Disable bilinear filtering when sampling textures.

7. Allocate and render to a low-precision color buffer. Lots of games would change the color depth to match the available VRAM. This is probably the hardest aspect to emulate unless you are actively counting VRAM usage and sticking to realistic values.

8. Bitcrush your textures before uploading them. The same reasoning applies here. Also, don't upload any mipmaps.

9. Lighting was done through vertex colors, which were calculated on the CPU. You don't have to limit yourself to CPU lighting but you do have to make sure lighting is done in the vertex shader.

10. Optional: implement the early model PS1 texture banding bug in your fragment shader.

This will give you a rendering pipeline that is good for basically all purposes except bit-accurate PS1 emulation. Of course, if you were doing bit-accurate emulation, nothing stops you from issuing a screen-filling quad and writing a GPU shader that does software rasterization on the GPU. Or launching a compute shader that accesses the framebuffer arbitrarily - although you do have to worry about memory coherency across warps and workgroups. Texture sampling can also be done "in software" if you so wish - i.e. by doing unfiltered reads to the texture which are glorified array lookups, and then filtering those reads as you wish.

[0] There was a brief moment where quads might have been able to win - artists like to work with them, and Nvidia was shipping quad hardware. But the advantage died very quickly, and quads can be easily converted to triangles - not so much the other way around.

羊.

This is a Chinese character that can refer to goats, rams, and several other kinds of "medium-sized animal with thick wooly coats and horns". English has no direct equivalent; we have to be too specific when we talk about these animals.

A model with a small number of neurons has to compact its concepts in order to fit within the parameter count while reducing loss. OP's article shows that the compaction is usually generalization: "goat" and "ram" get compressed into "羊". The canonical example of superposition, an image model where "car" feeds into a bunch of "dog" features, was shown to be actually generalization. In a sense, the model was so small that its optimizer didn't have the parameter budget to distinguish between "car" and "dog"; it has a single set of "thing that moves fast" features.

So basically, really small models are merging features into semantic buckets that are so generalized they don't make sense to big human brains unless we really, really squint. The buckets chosen happen to be what has the lowest loss, of course.

The Secure Enclave processor (SEP) is a separate processor that holds cryptographic material unique to the chip. That material is isolated from whatever compromise might happen on the main application processor; and there is no particular reason why you need more than one of them, even for multi-user. macOS has multiple users and uses the Secure Enclave just fine. For data encryption you'd have the SEP derive a different key for each user.

Secure Exclaves are special isolated processes that run on the same application processor as the regular OS. They're a very new OS feature and AFAIK Apple has barely talked about them until now.

Exclaves are isolated because Apple made a proprietary CPU extension called Guarded Exception Levels. It lets you separate an ARM exception level out into two privilege levels: guarded and unguarded. The guarded level can have different page permissions from the unguarded level, and switching between the two modes is extremely fast. Apple uses this to lock down iOS: its kernel, XNU, has it's entire virtual memory system hollowed out and replaced with a thing called the Secure Page Table Monitor (SPTM). XNU lives in EL2 (ARM hypervisor) but SPTM lives in GL2 (guarded hypervisor). In this configuration, SPTM is the only thing that can allocate memory, and it controls all memory allocations in the system. This is specifically why jailbreaks have become far harder to make[0]: you basically need to hack SPTM to get anything.

XNU, strangely enough, lives in both EL2 and EL1 (ARM kernel); but Apple also uses GL1 (guarded kernel) for a second, funnier OS called the Secure Kernel (SK). SK has its own exclusive resources and userland. Processes that run under SK cannot be tampered with or monitored by XNU because SPTM isolates them and their kernel from XNU. This is used for isolating any particularly security sensitive thing.

For example, code signing enforcement happens in an Exclave[1]. XNU can't run unsigned processes because it needs SPTM to bless the pages. But SPTM is supposed to be a very small attack surface; there is a long history of using memory safety bugs in the verification code to gain higher levels of privilege, so putting that code in GL2 would be bad. Instead, it gets put in an Exclave, where:

- A compromised XNU cannot tamper with the verifier, because SPTM won't give it write access to the pages.

- A compromised verifier doesn't compromise the whole system, because it's not part of SPTM/GL2.

- A compromised verifier can't interfere with other exclaves, because they're isolated by SK.

The only thing a compromised verifier can do is fail to reject an unsigned program, which would let you run specific unsigned code in EL0. You would not suddenly get kernel mode access from a verifier failure.

Anyway, what makes this relevant for HomeView is that all the microphone data processing can be isolated in an Exclave from the rest of the OS. So if the CIA wants to force your HomeView to listen to you, it needs to either compromise SPTM (very hard), or find a (non-memory-related) logic error in the listener exclave.

[0] This is also morally the same scheme as the Xbox 360 hypervisor that went decades without a softmod

[1] Morally speaking, it's an Exclave; it lives in GL0. But technically the code signing enforcement is in a different SPTM domain from the Secure Kernel, called the "Trusted Execution Monitor" (TXM). I would not be surprised if Apple migrates it over to an Exclave in the future.