Valve already gave Half-Life 2 away for free, and released the source code of the HL1 engine.
Is it technically illegal? Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Giving things away for free (at one point) is not the same as making it public domain or relinquishing your (copy)rights. Source available is not the same as open source. Open source code does not mean open source assets/product. I find it weird that this needs to be explained in this community.
> Giving things away for free is not the same as making it public domain or relinquishing your (copy)rights.
Obviously. But it does kill the usual "piracy is bad because companies lose money" argument - especially for a 22-year-old game.
> Source available is not the same as open source.
Obviously. But it does show that Valve is more interested in preserving old genre-defying games for the general public, rather than milking every last cent of revenue out of it.
GoldSrc (HL1 engine) is very much not open source (or even source available). There's at least one open source remake (which is possibly illegal due to using the SDK) but no official release.
> Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
So that makes it okay to pirate and steal games developed by your fellow indie game developers as well?
> Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Try doing the same thing to Nintendo.
Even large companies like Anthropic were not going to risk going to trial and getting bankrupted of over $120B+ in damages in using pirated copyrighted eBooks for training. The best case was a settlement for $1.5B which that is a record settlement in copyright law.
That was a special promotion with a defined end date. The game is not free. The only legitimate way to obtain it currently is to pay for it. Together with the false claim about HL1 being open source, you're really adding a lot of misinformation to this thread.
This project seems perfectly congruent with current year industry standards regarding copyright, which are to move fast and lobby for permission later.
A crime is a crime even before a judge rules over it. Sure, innocent until proven guilty, but most people know when they're doing something wrong and then don't do it.
Of course, this is a lot more grey area for copyright violations etc because it's a civil matter.
Pithy but untrue. The verbose-but-correct statement is about procedural prerequisites: Government officials are forbidden to imprison or fine you until your guilt is proved, to an impartial and properly-instructed jury in a fair trial, beyond a reasonable doubt. (The Scots have the better formulation for criminal cases: Guilty, or not proved.)
Illustration: OJ Simpson was found not guilty [sic] in his criminal trial. So he couldn't be imprisoned. But then a different jury found — under the lower, preponderance of the evidence standard — that Simpson did indeed murder his ex-wife and the other guy. The latter case was the civil action for wrongful death, brought by the survivors of his victims. The survivors won a $33.5M verdict. Simpson's assets were seized, and sold at a court-ordered auction, to pay the judgment — including his Heisman Trophy.
Neither of the jury verdicts altered the reality of whether Simpson did or didn’t kill the two victims.
(In Simpson’s second trial, the jury found him liable, not “guilty.” Guilt is the term used in criminal prosecutions. Liability is the term used in civil cases.)
There are legal forms of killing. It is only via the application of our legal institutions that criminality is decided. No specific act on its own is criminal, there is no Platonic Crime.
It's quite dangerous to make unsubstantiated comments and assumptions on US copyright law without the proper research.
Valve still owns the copyright to the game and just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent, especially when we know that the game is still being sold. [0]
They (Valve) reserve the right to enforce that and this site clearly does not have such a "license" and haven't disclosed as such. Why would you expect Valve to be in discussions with a 15 year old to redistribute the game for free?
> just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent
I don't think the parent comment is claiming it's legal, other than the (unlikely) chance that this is licensed, just that it's up to Valve to enforce and not really our concern. A lot of cool things (like the similar https://noclip.website/) are prima facie copyright infringement.
As a rule: don't bother with trying to "opt out" of data collection. Reject the collection entirely either by forcefully blocking it (ublock Origin for instance) or straight up not using the service.
Yes I don't understand what he means.
On Windows you can basically tone down the security to the point you basically tell it to shut up and let you do anything you want, including shooting yourself in the foot (which is fine by me).
On macOS you have to resolved to various tricks to be able to run stuff you have decided you want to run, for whatever reason.
A bet against Nvidia is smart. A bet against Palantir is not. Palantir has become deeply integrated into the surveillance states of America, and won't be going anywhere anytime soon.
But it has an unreasonable P/E ratio. The price is simply wrong.
It doesn't matter if it's the best firm ever and will get its dividends forever. You still calculate reasonably.
People say this kind of thing about Tesla as well, and Tesla has been stuck as a slightly-smaller-than-Mercedes-Benz sized firm for years and will stay like that forever, or even shrink relative to MB.
NVIDIA has a much more reasonable P/E ratio, even though it is of course very high.
Given that the market has moved so strongly away from dividends in favour of stock buybacks and other reinvestment (i.e. the successful companies are now much more often "growth" companies rather than "value" companies), and given e.g. Buffett's wisdom about total return, I don't know that traditional rules of thumb about P/E make sense any more.
Palantir is trading at 80x revenue (NTM), whereas Nvidia is only trading at 19x revenue (NTM).
Both companies are growing revenue at a similar rate (~50% YoY), and Nvidia has a higher net margin, however Palantir's share price is up 717% over 18 months, whereas Nvidia is only up 124%.
It's hard to argue Palantir's valuation reflects its fundamentals, even if you believe Palantir will be benefit from lucrative government contracts for years to come.
Buying companies at 80x revenue has not historically been a great way to make money, unless they're growing revenue at several hundred percent per year.
Per Wikipedia, the idea that the IDF is the "most moral army in the world" comes from Colonel Richard Kemp, a retired British army officer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_of_arms
It's a throwaway line Israeli officials have been using for a long time. I heard Netanyahou himself use it to describe the IDF and explain it can't possibly do wrong.
This is really cool, but also totally something you'd think existing AI agents should have zero issues with. _Especially_ if they're supposed to be for coding, I'd expect loads of documentation to be baked-in, so to speak
